Hi guys, So we're currently in the process of removing some of the less useful and more suspect links from our profile, and used the Google disavow tool to do so. We uploaded the .txt file to the search console on 7th July this year, 2 months ago now, and according to our most recent site crawl, the suspect links are still showing up on our link profile. Do we have any idea how long this is roughly supposed to take? The ideas I've found online are conflicting - anything from 3-4 weeks to 6-9 months. Which is it? Is there any way of fast-tracking this process? Thanks!

I was doing some back link review of competitors and I have noticed that many of our competition have 300+ do follow back links from Justia.com  and an additional 300+ do follow links from law.cornell.edu (they share the same database). The links on Justia are from different pages and they are all going to the root of our competitors site. So the questions are as follows; 1: For the purpose of SEO is this considered SPAM 2: If not SPAM, then does it have a positive effect on the competitions website and should I attempt to emulate for my client. Thanks in advance. -Jeff

Last year I noticed that overnight my site was backlinked by 1000's of spammy links.
All with same anchor text and all really awful unrelated sites (law, money, mobile phone, pr0n sites, etc). I've not been hit with any penalties (or at least been messaged with anything to that effect), and I still float around top 10 for that anchor text, but I don't like having 1000's of spammy links with exact anchor text pointing to my site. Especially when all the other competitors have a fraction of the number of links. What would be the best way to combat these links before they do serious damage to my rankings.
If you want to see for yourself, the site is www.alexkilbeephotography.co.uk Thanks in advance.

What are your thoughts on SEOs and web designers putting their own links in the footers of client sites. For the sake of argument, lets assume that the client is happy for the link to be there. I'm referring to the SEO merits of the link being there from an 'irrelevant' website. My belief is that this goes against what Google is looking for and that these are irrelevant links and likely to be picked up and penalised.  That's what I believe! However, I see lots of sites offering SEO services that have dofollow links from their client sites, using exact match anchor text and they are all ranking highly. Is it just a matter of time before Google sniffs them out and penalises them for it?  Or should I be going through my client sites and adding myself a dofollow link in the footer? (with their permission of course). The highest ranking sites in any UK city do this.  If you search SEO Manchester, SEO Leeds etc and find the top ranking sites and check them out on opensite explorer, they are all using a disproportionate amount of dofollow backlinks form client sites.