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I personally do everything manually.  I think that the link removal tools can work great for some sites, but your best chance at identifying the bad links and keeping the good ones is to look at them manually.  2500 domains is a lot, but not impossible.  I'm currently working on an account of about that size and it will take me about 10-14 days to go through as many.  Once you get going you will recognize patterns and it will go faster. I used to get emails on my own but I have just hired someone to do this for me.  I find that the automated tools miss a lot of them.  I was considering hiring from o-desk or mechanical turk, but in my situation, because my business is expanding and most of what I do is penalty removal, it's worth my while to hire and train someone to do this for me. btw...if you've got 2500 domains, you won't have 2500 emails.  Many will be offline or nofollowed or perhaps even natural. Ezine Articles links definitely need to be removed if they are followed links.  Often times those links are nofollowed, but if you have a high enough account level there then they are followed and need to go. A few other points: -Yes you're right.  It's not enough to just disavow.  Google's going to want to see evidence that you've tried hard to remove links. -Lately I have only be using links from WMT and not other sources like Majestic and ahrefs.  That may cut down on the number of domains you have to deal with.  So far it is working for me. Hope that helps!