How to get rid of ezinearticles links etc?

[Adamzzz]

I know the standard answer of email all the sites but,

I dont like my chances of even getting any delisted..
Have around 260 links with about 60% of them junk.
Some links are from sig links on forums that I actually legitimately post to and from real comments I have made on the web over the years. Should all of these go?

Was thinking of hiring a freelancer to do this or maybe going through an online tool if anyone has any suggestions?

An example is this http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Era-of-Digital-Signage&id=6236852

Edit:  Well I got a reply from ezine and from goarticles! They are removing the articles, maybe its becoming a headache for them all as,

Sorry, GoArticles.com is no longer accepting new article submissions or account signups. We wish this wasn't the end, but unfortunately, it is and we aren't able to continue. You can download a backup copy of all of your submissions by logging into your existing account so that you can re-use your content on your own website or other competitor sites. Thank you for being a member and we're sorry that this site will be coming to an end shortly.

[RyanPurkey]

Good work Adam! You pretty much have to go with the contact method at first if at all possible. As more sites transition away from this sort of thing though you'll likely run into more success as you do. It's abundantly easy for Google to spot sites like goarticles and ezine and spank them if they choose. Who knows, that could be something that comes up in the EU...

Generally forum links that are from useful and accurate comments don't bother me as they're semantically relevant to the conversation and pretty well established in the global scope of the web. I wouldn't expect them to bring too much value though as well, especially the sig ones. Still, if you're ranking highly within the forum, and your comments are adding to the conversation, the sig link would be good just from a users perspective. I'd leave it for that alone.

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

You shouldn't worry about this, as far as i remember ezinearticles and most article directories are nofollow, so no harm done. To back this up, i know 3 websites with tons and tons of links from article directories (like 10k or more) and nothing happened to them (no penguin or manual penalty).

[Adamzzz]

People say it both ways but it makes sense to me that if 80% of my links are from article farms and link wheels then it does not look good. I do have some good strong links 3 or 4 of them enough to put me on the front page, even better links than most of the top 10 but 3 or 4 good links in amongst hundreds of articles and up until 6 months ago "PR7 web2.0 properties"

Those sites probably did not have such a stinking overall link profile like mine

Google gives me no benefit of the doubt.. so I have to clean up what outsourced SEOers have done in the past and It seems like that is what google wants people in my boat to do.

Hopefully these ezine articles and GoArticles removed and a final link wheel that I dismantled after finding the login details to its final spoke a webs.com "property" by tracking down the contractor that made it.  Hopefully that does it.

At the moment I rank around 40-50 in the AU google

[MarieHaynes]

Some ezine article links are indeed followed.  This can cause problems, because some websites can have, say 9 nofollowed links from ezine article pages and then the 10th is followed.  As such, many people miss those.

That's great that your article marketing didn't hurt you, but this is exactly the type of link that can hurt others in the eyes of Penguin.

Adam, it's good that you got the articles removed.  You may also want to do a search for the text of these articles in case someone has taken them and republished them as these will be unnatural links too.

If you do find additional article links that you can't get removed, just disavow them.  Make sure you do so at the domain level.