[DELETED]

Hi Scootek,

I've just analysed my backlinks and there are a few different ways in which you can do it.

Have you got access to GWMT?

Scott

The best thing to-do is export all of your links from WMT...

How many have you got? 100s? 1000s? 10000s?

The best and the most accurate way of doing it is going through each link 1 by 1 and checking it... If it looks spammy or un-natural with a low PR and DA then you need to look into a little further.

Do you have access into any other tools?

Let me try and give you a different way to look at things.....

Google stated that they made it very difficult for competitors to do negative seo. This is obvious, because people would just start spamming valid, content rich sites and they would get penalized. (this will tie in later)

After penguin rolled out, people immediately said it was coming from faulty backlinks (bad sources, spam, etc.) When in reality i think that penguin was actually an onpage update and not an offpage update.

Previously, spam blog networks, xrumer blasts, and other crappy link methods worked, and after penguin they don't. So you could have previously used the link juice from these sites, and after penguin, google made all these links nulled.

However, these links don't give a negative seo effect, just a neutral one. (unless google manually reviews your website and puts a penalty on it). Google made it like this so you could not spam competitors to take them down.

So to sum this all up, in my opinion (and i'm sure there will be hundreds) you don't need to get rid of spammy backlinks as they count as neutral (not positive or negative) links. What you should be doing is a building a link profile of diverse links, with diverse anchors, and make EVERYTHING unique and extremely high quality content.

I hope this helped, i know it's an out there theory but it's the only one to me that explains everything.

I'm not convinced of this. Before I shut down one of my own websites, I put it to the test. I used Bookmarking Demon to create a large number of PR0 spammy backlinks to my site, then pinged all of them. Within a week, my site had been blasted into the dark by Google. For several keywords, I went from page 1-3 to pages 15+.
I've come across other people having tested similar methods and got similar results. I believe negative SEO does exist, unfortunately.