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Link wheels are a pretty old school tactic and Google Penguin (links) & Panda (thin content) stamped out the wide-scale use of them. Here's what I'd do in your situation: 1. Report his website(s) to Google, giving as much information as possible. The more information you can collect on the link wheel sites the better: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=en 2. There's no point you disavowing nofollow links to your website as they aren't passing link equity. You should only disavow them if they are followed links - for example if he was trying to get you a Google penalty by making it look like you were part of a paid link scheme. 3. Have a look at the highest quality backlinks his websites have (open site explorer). Chances are he has decent links outside of his link wheel that you don't if he's ranking above you. Take a look at his domain authority to get a general sense of how strong his organic profile is. 4. Take a long, hard look at your own site, content, offering and backlinks and try to improve it. Can you create engaging content for your customers? Can you create a unique proposition that will make you stand apart from your competitors? All in all, despite the frustration I would avoid agonising over any dubious SEO tactics being used by your competitors - so long as they aren't negative SEO attacks on you. If they're willing to take such short-sighted risks then they risk long term harm to their business. George

I've had good luck filing a webspam report through Chrome rather than WMT. Might be worth a try.

I appreciate the synopsis and the good feedback. In our case, we feel that we have a very strong ability to guide users to the site of our choice.  Local seems like a misfire for a global software company. Since there doesn't seem to be a loud consensus that we should be working with any specific site at the moment, I think we'll send reviewers to BBB, since customers sometimes tell us that is an important trust signal for them.

That helps lots, Matt. Thanks for being on the ball.  I'll sleep better tonight. Cheers.

Just a followup to this old thread for anyone working through similar issues. We are monitoring what Google finds through their "Download Latest Links."  We add the domains where the bad links are to the Disavow Links tool. Google no longer ranks the site for any "sex" terms. No warnings have been issued to the site in 4 months. Things are stable at the moment, but we're going to be picking the lint out of this link list for a long time.

1. Penguin is the problem.  Have never received any notices from Google, but the drop corresponds exactly to the date. 2.  Ok I hear you. I'll 301 it to a competitors site   (it's a joke!) 3. Good point.