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I am seeing it with providers of local SEO services - either having over 10 "resource" pages with links to totally unrelated sites or linking each letter in the word "Copyright" to a resource link page. These are clearly link manipulation schemes - why is it that Google hasn't penalized more of these sites? And SEO providers are still selling and profiting from these services. Disgusting.

Thanks Marie. I went ahead and deleted that page and submitted a disavow request. Hopefully that will prevent any future issues.

First, don't freak out. What does the anchor text look like? Is it for a term you're trying to rank for on that page? Chances are actually pretty low that it's going to hurt you. Google has a few intent- and source-detection mechanisms built in that work relatively well. If this is a high-value page that you're making a lot of money on or that is ranking well, don't move it and don't 410 or 404 it. It's Google's job to filter through spam and spam attacks, and they do an OK job. I don't think it's totally wrong to disavow the links, but my experience is that people generally over-react. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-bad-links-disavow-17195.html TL;DR this is all good advice, but don't drop or redirect a high-value page.

Just to clarify, let me be more specific about what I initially planned to do: Let's say my current website is at: example.com. Rel canonical is set so that if a user lands on www.example.com, they're redirect to the non www version. For some reason, the negative seo targeted the www.example.com instead of the main url. So I'm thinking since all the bad links are pointing to the www version, redirecting that to somewhere else may help. What you say makes sense, that google can detect that both versions are from the same domain. I didn't see any major drops from the penguin last night. The main drop started middle of March and continued through April. This seems to have been an algo penalty vs. manual penalty as I didn't receive a warning. The entire homepage wouldn't redirect, just the www domain. I doubt anyone would be affected by this since the rel canonical is set to the non www. I think I agree with Chris on this and just wait it out and see if the disavow request goes anywhere.

Matthew, much appreciated. Thankfully I don't need to worry about redirects since it's just a transition to a new template. About 90% of the other elements will remain intact. Checking webmaster tools after the transition sounds really helpful. ps. Thanks to everyone for your great responses!

Thanks so much! I'll have a look at issues with respect to the Panda update and I'll see if I find anything there.