14,000 blog comment spam links placed on one domain!!

[GrumpyCarl]

Trying to clear up a manual link penalty a client has received and I have found the client's site has been blog commenting 14,000 times on just one domain!! I need to do a reconsideration request and show Google that I have cleaned up the mess (the client has 50k backlinks, of which I am not happy with about 75% so far!!) but I cannot expect the website in question to go through 14k pages.

What would people advise here. Would you state the sheer number of links on this site in the reconsideration request and use the disavow tool? Doesn't this suggest that I have been lazy and not put the effort into to clearing things up up

[Devanur-Rafi]

You can try something like this: http://www.removeem.com/

I believe, it does not matter how many links you have from one website pointing to you but, links from many low quality websites is something to look out for while doing link profile audit.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[GrumpyCarl]

Thanks, will check the site out. The links are very clearly blot comment spam. While I cannot give the name of my client here, one sample url from the site should show what I mean. I have broken the link on purpose so it's not active

http://ryantennismusic. com/blog/?p=19&rnment_moveForm(com,_666,/www_paydayadvanceadventeplytocom=556&replytocom=504

The problem I have is that this is clearly a junk link and the penalty we got from Google says

Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to myclient.co.uk/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.

With this in mind i am trying to manually remove as many links as possible. I tried a previous reconsideration and a disavow but no joy with that. I hope they will accept my explanation on this domain

[JohnVanDekker]

I believe you will have more success with Google if you do 1. disavow, and 2. demonstrate that you will not just clean up the spam links placed in your clients site, but also 3. take some steps to keep the problem from recurring by implementing better captcha, etc... Rather than just cleaning up after the issue, taking proactive steps to avoid the recurrence of the issue shows you to be a better Webmaster to Google

[GrumpyCarl]

John,

Sorry, I think I may have worded the question poorly. The 14,000 spam links are on an external site, pointing to my client's. The client used an seo company a while back and their seo strategy seemed to involve running senuke and Xrumer. With the senuke articles they are fairly easy to get rid of, emailing a site owner and asking them to remove the link from one article isn't too much trouble.

Emailing a website and asking them to remove blog comment spam placed on 14,000 pages of just one site could be more trouble. I cannot expect them to do this so hopefully google will allow me to disavow the whole domain and not expect this to be manually cleaned up

[Dr-Pete]

I understand your concern, but if you don't think that contacting the site to have the links removed is a viable option, then disavow really is your only recourse. The only way to find out if Google will accept that as enough is to try it and see. I wouldn't obsess over this one domain, but when you file for reconsideration, it will be important to show progress in other areas. In other words, maybe you can't remove these 14K links (and will just disavow the domain), but make sure you remove some other, bad links, and show an effort somewhere.

Beyond cooperation from the webmaster, your only other recourse is legal, and that's just not going to be worth the time, money, and grief, in 99% of cases. Plus, if a past SEO company did this, you don't even have much legal recourse - the 3rd-party site didn't do anything wrong.