What do I do with these back links?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

In the last two weeks, I've got 10 pingbacks from this http://caraccidentlawyer.cc/coroner-ids-berkeley-bodies-who-were-killed-in-recent-car-accident/ and sites like it. The featured attorney is a competitor of ours and, since the links aren't sex/drugs/rock&roll related, (and he's linked too) I doubt this is a negative SEO campaign, but I want it to stop. These blogs are basically pure spam. Any suggestions?

[TomRayner]

Hi Ruben

This looks to me to be an auto-scraper and trackback tool.  It's pretty primitive and useless, by all accounts.

The bad news is that there's very little you can do to prevent it, other than contacting the person themselves and asking them to look into the issue.

The good news is that I'm very confident that this will be having no negative effect on your site.  As is the case in the web, blogs and tools exist like this and work away on literally millions of sites.  I have no doubt that the algorithm takes this into account and simply devalues/ignores any of these kind of links.  With the pingbacks being so little, it certainly won't be having an affect.

If it was nearing the hundreds of thousands, it may become an issue - and so my advice to you would be to make a weekly note of these kind of links and if/when they appear.  Save the URLs away in a spreadsheet and should they become very large in numbers, add them to a disavow file and submit that to Google.  Just this week we've had Matt Cutts encourage the use of pre-empting bad links and negative SEO attacks by submitting a disavow file, even if you haven't received a warning/penalty or any ill-effects.

I don't think this is anywhere near the stage where you need to concern yourself with that, but in order to be future-proof, make a note now and weekly as you go along.  Only if the links started being really big in numbers (10,000+) would I look at submitting a disavow file.  But I'd be pretty confident that you won't have the need to do this.

Hope this helps ease your concerns a bit.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Great answer, Tom.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thank you very much. I'm still new, so I get nervous. I really appreciate you taking the effort to explain this in such detail.

[TomRayner]

Any time! It's definitely wise to err on the side of caution. If you ever want to chew the fat on SEO/digital stuff I'd be happy to help.