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It also sounds to me like you are expecting to see results from using the disavow tool too quickly. According to Google the disavow tool should be used with caution and only by those who absolutely know they need it. Results will not be instant and it can take several weeks or even months for some sites to recover, and recovery is often not to the point it was at prior to being hit. How did you determine that your site was being penalized?

The number of links that show up in webmaster tools is not an exact carbon copy of the links Google considers when figuring out where to rank your site. Google is typically aware of A LOT more links to your site than just the ones which show up on the webmaster tools list & I wouldn't put too much stock in the number you find there. Google is not going to show you their whole deck of cards, unfortunately. That's why sites like Open Site Explorer are awesome for finding all the links that webmaster tools doesn't show.

I would also advise that you focus more attention on your site itself rather than just its backlink profile. Work on developing quality content that people want to link to & develop your social networking presence on Twitter, FB, G+, Pinterest etc... Ideally, you want your visitors to be the ones sharing your links and content, so make sure your content is interesting.

If the site is doing well, avoid panicking - lots of webmasters freak out and go on a rampage trying to remove every link, when they should just sit back and relax. If we're talking thousands and thousands of junk comments, it's something you might want to be concerned about. If it's a lower number, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it and would focus on building quality backlinks going forward. Contacting blog owners is a nightmarish task because the sort who have blogs that auto-approve junk comments are usually not the most tech-savvy and often don't even think to include their contact info anywhere. Lots of them don't own their own domain, so you can't get their whois info that way either. If it were me, I'd put my time and energy into building good, diverse backlinks rather than spending tons of time trying to remove these links that don't seem to have negatively affected you.

Thanks Charles, I will try to get these links taken down.

I briefly had a forum on one of my sites, but after getting inundated with spam I decided to remove it for the time being. During the brief time it was up, most of the spammers were stopped from registering, but a few managed to get through and posted tons of links to their prescription drug sites. These posts were deleted almost instantly, but the spammers also created DoFollow backlinks on high authority community sites like ning.

The forum posts they linked to were deleted immediately, so the links never went anywhere and the forum has been deleted entirely for a few months now. When clicked, the spam backlinks now bring someone to a "Sorry, that page doesn’t exist" page on my site.

My site suffered a bit in the last Panda update and it made me look through my backlink profile, finding lots of these links - even though the pages on my site are long gone, could these links be hurting my site?

Can a DoFollow link to a site help or hurt the main domain, even if the actual page it's linking to is deleted?

Definitely too many times since the end of last month. Server problems do happen and I've never come across a 100% perfect host, but a site going down 4 times in just a few weeks is no good, especially if it's for more than just a few seconds. I would talk to your host and see if they have an explanation...and if not, I'd search for a new one.

Youtube definitely will remove views and even the videos occasionally if the views were obtained in a black hat way that goes against their TOS. It's just not worth the risk, and most clever people can tell that there's no way a video about something relatively obscure got so many (real) views so quickly

Very spammy, and videos with fake views stand a pretty good chance of getting removed from Youtube eventually

Even if you haven't built the links yourself, that doesn't necessarily mean they're hurting your site.

If the links are coming from spammy sites, it could be hurting your site, but Google's algorithm is pretty sophisticated and if your search rankings have fallen, it may not actually be a penalty but just them adjusting things. I would focus my energy on developing more good links. I see on your site you have a reciprocal link directory. When it comes to SEO, I'm not a huge fan of using reciprocal links as a main link-building strategy. Google loves diversity, so if most of your backlinks are from sites you are also linking to in your directory, that might not be the best SEO strategy, especially when some of the sites are not in the same niche as yours.

Are you sure these links are actually hurting your site? A lot of people think their site is being penalized when it actually isn't. If we're talking just a few links from lousy sites, it's probably not hurting your site. If we're talking a large scale thing though, it could have a negative effect.

Your best bet is to try to have the links actually removed from the spammy sites. If that fails, that's where the disavow tool comes in, but it can potentially take quite a long time to see any changes

If the site is doing well, avoid panicking - lots of webmasters freak out and go on a rampage trying to remove every link, when they should just sit back and relax. If we're talking thousands and thousands of junk comments, it's something you might want to be concerned about. If it's a lower number, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it and would focus on building quality backlinks going forward. Contacting blog owners is a nightmarish task because the sort who have blogs that auto-approve junk comments are usually not the most tech-savvy and often don't even think to include their contact info anywhere. Lots of them don't own their own domain, so you can't get their whois info that way either. If it were me, I'd put my time and energy into building good, diverse backlinks rather than spending tons of time trying to remove these links that don't seem to have negatively affected you.

Are you sure these links are actually hurting your site? A lot of people think their site is being penalized when it actually isn't. If we're talking just a few links from lousy sites, it's probably not hurting your site. If we're talking a large scale thing though, it could have a negative effect.

Your best bet is to try to have the links actually removed from the spammy sites. If that fails, that's where the disavow tool comes in, but it can potentially take quite a long time to see any changes

It also sounds to me like you are expecting to see results from using the disavow tool too quickly. According to Google the disavow tool should be used with caution and only by those who absolutely know they need it. Results will not be instant and it can take several weeks or even months for some sites to recover, and recovery is often not to the point it was at prior to being hit. How did you determine that your site was being penalized?

The number of links that show up in webmaster tools is not an exact carbon copy of the links Google considers when figuring out where to rank your site. Google is typically aware of A LOT more links to your site than just the ones which show up on the webmaster tools list & I wouldn't put too much stock in the number you find there. Google is not going to show you their whole deck of cards, unfortunately. That's why sites like Open Site Explorer are awesome for finding all the links that webmaster tools doesn't show.

I would also advise that you focus more attention on your site itself rather than just its backlink profile. Work on developing quality content that people want to link to & develop your social networking presence on Twitter, FB, G+, Pinterest etc... Ideally, you want your visitors to be the ones sharing your links and content, so make sure your content is interesting.