Reporting a Link Scheme to Google

[FDAitsupport]

Hi Mozzers,

Two questions...
There is a negative article showing up in the SERPS for my boss name which we've been doing some rep management to get rid of. Well, someone started building links to that property recently, and it has pushed the result to the #2 spot. I did some research, and the property has never had a single link pointed to it until recently. There are 7 referring domains, all of which use the same theme, and have the same author for each article. Each property has over 1,000 articles in not even 2 years. All articles are based around the same topic. The property they are promoting negatively went from 0 backlinks to 55 in under 2 months. My Question is, is it okay to report this to Google? It seems like a cut and dry example of a link scheme.

Second question, I have recently seen an increase of spammy links showing up in ahrefs. These links were likely built by a predecessor of mine as far back as 2010. I had been letting them fall off naturally, but now they are coming back (around the same time the above mentioned link scheme began). Do you think someone is re-indexing my links as a sort of attack? Or is it possible Google is re-indexing them? I'm going to contact the webmasters where I can, but seriously considering using disavow tool. My rankings started dropping when the links started getting indexed. And continue to drop. Negative SEO, or Googles recent "Quality Update"?

Thanks for any and all input.

Ryan

[gazzerman1]

Q1: Google is very bad at dealing with stuff like this, they really don't care to much in my experience. I have seen otehrs try and flood the front page with things like twitter facebook and linkedin to push down negative content. Try to use these strong networks to boost his name. Also might as well give it a shot and report it to Google.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

Q2: Every day Googlebot gets smarter and more nosy! It crawls javascript it does al;l sorts of things. Crappy sites go up and down and have index issues eventually Google will get to them and index them. This is likely what you are seeing.

If they are pretty bad then get them in the disavow file ASAP. A Penguin update is not that far away and you need to be ready a month in advance.