What to do with these toxic links?

[DemiGR]

Back in July I had posted here that I thought someone was doing negative SEO against us.  We monitor our links on a daily basis, and a lot of toxic links came in quickly within a few days.  So we were pro-active and ended up disavowing those links soon after we saw them.  Shortly after that our ranking start to drop and we lost a good amount of traffic, though I do not know if its really connected since we only disavowed those toxic links and we weren't ranking FROM those links since they were disavowed so quickly.

Now, its happening again.  20 new inbound domains linking to us from complete crap websites with crap content and not done by us.  I want to disavow them, but I am thinking that maybe the first time we disavowed the links, it hurt us, and maybe disavowing now will hurt us further?  I think Google should be able to filter out this crap but who knows, too much depends on this being handled correctly.

Here are some of the crappy links:

http://optibike.com/?home.php=page/loans/student-loan-without-a-cosigner-2.html
http://designsbynickthegeek.com/?index.php=finance/loans/loan-for-you-3.html
http://www.nuvivaweightloss.com/?index.php=article/loans/300-loan-today.html
http://ecommercesalesmultipliersystem.com/?home.php=board/loans/fast-loan-with-monthly-payments-2.html

They are mostly duplicate content across a network of sites. How would you guys handle this?

[RafalJ]

Always disavow to show you are being proactive and have good intentions. If you don't you might get a manual penalty that will wipe your site off the index completely.

The problem here is not really what to do with the links but how to stop them appearing as I would imagine every month there will be more of them appearing on similar sites. You have to find hosting companies of these sites and take it with them, reporting violation, asking to take these sites down, tracing the person/company who built them, threatening to sue...

Good luck

[CommT]

I don't know for sure, but it looks like some of those sites you've provided with the crap links on have been hacked. I would try and contact the site owner, because Nick the Geek site doesn't look the same on the homepage as it does on the page you provide. I expect Nick the Geek (and the rest) will probably be only too happy to hear from you given that you are telling them of a problem with their websites.

I guess if I'm wrong and Nick the Geek is also Nick the spammer then you could maybe try the hosting providers?

Best of luck,

Amelia

[CommT]

Didn't mean to imply that links to your site are crap, or that your site is - just that these ones are.

[DemiGR]

Didnt think about this, but i think you are right.  It does look like all these sites have been hacked

[Travis_Bailey]

Getting penalized for bad links requires a manual review or an algorithm update. Considering the vertical, I would imagine the backlink profile was pretty spammy to begin with. The payday loan update happened in June.

I think that is more likely your answer.

[DemiGR]

Backlink profile isnt spammy at all actually, and June/July were our best months ever in terms of organic search so I do not think we were hit with payday loan update. We started losing organic traffic in August. Are you sure that penalization requires a manually review?