How to spot a bad backlink?

Mrmontgomery,

Unfortunately there is no tool that will simply scan your site and say “ok these links are labeled bad and these are good”. You will have to do some digging and look at actual websites making links to yours. You will then have to determine if the website is of good quality or not. This is a little easier said than done. In general just think about how the website could be useful to a user and what value it provides. If it looks like the site exists to make money for the owner and nothing else, there is a good chance that it is not good to have it linking to your site. Sites that have tons of content that is poorly written, that provides no real benefit, or that otherwise just look like poorly made sites are not good to have linking to yours.

Perhaps you can find more answers here,

A How to Guide on Identifying Bad Links and Pruning Them Using Google

Hope that helps,
Shawn

That's funny you mention that (paid SEO link networks) because I figured that's exactly what link buyers would do, report backlink networks via the disavow tool. Proof that selling links to the public is a bad idea (long term).

I'm pretty sure Google only created that disavow tool to get people to nark out paid SEO links/networks. Why go looking for link networks when webmasters will send you the network links on their own.