Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi James, In this case, I would try and remove the poor-quality links. Disavowal is a good tool is you can't remove something, but if a link is truly gone, it can't hurt you again in the future. It can be time-consuming, but the process of removal works best if requests come from an official company email account. We have found that it's best to follow up a week or so later if you get no response. Any links you can't remove that you feel are particularly bad, you can disavow. This isn't a necessity and you might want to wait until you think they're hurting - Matt Cutts did say this week that you can feel free to disavow links when you're _not _penalised, but I tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to that advice. I'd definitely try to remove them first. This should eliminate the need to start with a fresh website or fresh content. Cheers, Jane

Wanted to add one more thing.  If it's possible, you may want to use the url removal tool to remove these new nasty pages from the Google index.