Is one of my competitors trying to get my site penalized?

[davegill]

Hi guys, I have been ranking #2 for a popular search term for several months now, and today I noticed a drop to #5, so I went to check my backlink profile, and I'm seeing thousands of no-follow exact keyword matched backlinks, all from spammy looking websites. I looked at some of the links and they do link to me, but I didn't generate these links, and I have never paid anybody externally to build links for me.

What is the best course of action for me here? link disavow tool?

[dotfly]

Thats right - you already mentioned to use the disavow tool for those links. I dont think that there is any other useful possibility to get rid of them.

Theoretically you can write to the webmasters of these sites but this is not very practicable or helpful.

[davegill]

Turns out the person built over 25000 links in a matter of 2 weeks. Pains me to think there are so called marketers that resort to these kinds of tactics. Thanks for the input @mrcensorius

[dotfly]

Damn... this is always a horrible thing and the most frustrating aspect about this is that there is no effective solution that can help to protect anybody in advance from such black hat techniques... sorry to say that but this is a development which becomes more and more common... wish you the all the best!