smithaa02 - 7:37 pm on Nov 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

Jez...imo the downward trend is temporary and at least a good sign that google is processing the disavows. It should (based on my experience) wear off. Pretty much link detox.

As for choosing the links... Usually your SEO company will leave footprints. My SEO company was dumb enough to sign all his fake splogs with the same username so they were easy enough to find.

My suggested keys for finding bad links:

* Use a third party link removal source (they should provide you with suggestions)
* Audit your site (scale permitting)
* Isolate links by when they were created (ahrefs can help with this)...so if you got say 500 links in march but 50 in february...concentrate on those march ones. IMO artificial link velocity is the single most important factor google uses in finding fake links. They're probably not counting all those march links anyways...key IMO is to flatten those 'mountains'
* Probably safe to remove all parasite comments unless they look REALLY legit
* Target suspicious off-topic links to your site (especially foreign language ones)
* Keep an eye out for sites that link to you and other known commercial interest. If they have a blatant in-content link to another site...then chances are your link wasn't organic.
* Be very critical of splogs and article links. IMO google perhaps doesn't penalize you for article links per say, but rather link profiles that have too high a percentage of artical links. I don't know.
* Keep an eye on the anchor text (easy to do with ahrefs). If you built for blue widgets, start with those keywords with your audit...makes finding fake links pretty easy.
* If you know other clients that were used by your SEO company this can make finding fake links pretty easy because if the site links to you and another customer's of the seo...that's too much of a coincidence.
* You might use netcomber to find more your seo's links