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Hi Jane,

Thanks for the response.

I'm familiar with the process of asking for link takedowns and for going through the disavowal process - the main thing I'm asking is whether or not having **identical **links is harmful - the pagerank for several of the linking sites is quite high, the backlink itself is an endnote to what looks to be a repeating set of glossaries about a medical procedure... many other backlinks are completely unambiguous about whether or not they should be removed altogether, but I'm looking for a bit of clarification as to whether or not it's ok to have that many identical links in terms of google's hamfisted approach to penalizing.

Thanks

The site on which I'm working has been experiencing a month-to-month decline since the Panda and Penguin updates - I didn't get an unnatural links notification, but have clearly fallen off the face of Google with many of the more important rankings. After running a scan on my backlinks, I found over 110 identical backlinks (it looks like the same medical definition and my website is listed in the endnotes as a source - just the URL, not anchor text), some from reputable websites with high pageranks and others that look very 'spammy.'

We've redesigned the architecture of the site, so the actual link itself has a 301 redirect on it, but I'm just wondering exactly how much of a liability is it to have these links out there? I'm guessing it's an all or nothing kind of thing given the identical content on each page - on one hand, I'm pretty frantic to get to the root of the Google penalties and get back in their good graces. On the other hand, I don't want to kill the site completely by going after a set of valuable links.

Has anyone dealt with this before?