How do you remove badlinks or Spam Links?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Kim Romarez: How do you remove badlinks or Spam Links?
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  ?ukasz Rogala: Try emailing each site admin to remove them or put them into disavow tool.
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  Stanly Chirayath: Check your webmaster tools to find what are the spam links pointing to your domain. Then follow the steps below:
  1. block the url in your robot.txt file
  2. request "Remove URLs" in your webmaster tools.
  After some days again check whether the link is again listed in webmaster tools.
  I think I have not confused you!
  
  Regards,
• 
  Roy Engel: Use the disvow links tool. First look at this video by matt cutts ;Disavow links then read this ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487 >> pls notice this should only be used with caution
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  Sindhupriya Joseph: It's recommend to remove the links manually  ;if it's not possible only should disavow the links  ;using Google webmaster tools.
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  Chomp Digital: I see at as either waste your time contacting the owners of spammy sites or just disavow them and move on. Obviously research the sites in question before disavowing any of them, some of the sites that are relevant to your site or niche might be helping your rank. 
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  Matt Staton: +Stanly Chirayath option 1 will hurt them, not help them.
  
  
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  Jelani Burton: Everybody who commented before me has provided sound advice.  ;If you have links on old article directory sites, go through those and manually remove. Then the ones that you don't have access to, you'll have to email each webmaster manually.  ;Those that cannot be removed get added to your disavow list. ;
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  Stanly Chirayath: +Matt Staton ;The question is about spammers' link, not other links provided by good sites. It is one of the best option I experienced.
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  Matt Staton: +Stanly Chirayath let's assume my domain is domain.com and the spammy site linking to me is spammy.com
  
  Now let's assume spammy.com/page/ is linking to domain.com/page/
  
  Which page are you suggesting I add to my robots.txt which is located on my server at domain.com/robots.txt
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  Marty Eigner: Try to contact the owners of the links first. If you can't remove them that way then use the disavow tool.
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  Stanly Chirayath: +Matt Staton spammy.com/page/ to be blocked in your domin.com robots.txt. And this link has to be manually removed from Google webmaster tools. If you encounter a site link is spam, better to block the domain itself, rather page or directory.
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  Matt Staton: +Stanly Chirayath h can you show me an authoritative site that recommends this approach.
  
  A robots.txt file is used to signal to Google pages on your domain that you would like them to ignore (ie not index).
  
  I love to hear from others on the thread too. 
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  Stanly Chirayath: +Matt Staton ;www.mala.co.in has an old robots-old.txt in its root. I kept this file as my active robots.txt around 1 and half year to bring down spam and other obsolete  ;links cleared from googles error pages. I removed it only two months ago. This site has only 600 average page views but total hit would be over 10,000/day, and consumes 20 to 25GB bandwidth. Now it is under control and has less than 5GB consumption. In addition I blocked IPs (over 400) of each spam url in .htaccess file and requesting removal in webmaster tools.
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  Matt Staton: +Stanly Chirayath ;were the pages they linking to actual live pages or "fake" pages - i.e. would cause a 404? - or both?
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  Clay Nichols - SEO Consultant: Don't just go straight to the disavow tool. See if you can reach out to the web admin's of the sites in question and try and get them removed first. ;
  
  The Disavow tool is there to be used as last remaining option kind of deal, not matter how easy it is. ;
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  Stanly Chirayath: +Matt Staton ;Most of them were fake urls generated by spam bots. Some were created by spammers taking advantage of anonymous access to content creation. 404 and access denied were the result, now redirecting to front page. ;
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  Matt Staton: +Stanly Chirayath ;I'd still love to see an article on this - because it doesn't make sense.  ;Adding another person's domain to your own domain's robots.txt is not how a robots.txt file is to be used from everything I've read on robots.org - do you have a source that shows this as a best practice?
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  Stephen Steele: It's actually a fairly long convoluted process. I would start with the easiest option, which is to collect a list of domains, and look up the registered webmaster. ;
  
  From there, you just ask nicely to take down the links. I would avoid anything that looks like  ;a threat. In fact, I would just say you screwed up and are trying to fix it. ;
  
  Once you are to that point, you should email them every then days, three times. If they don't respond by then, you can then submit them for a disavow. Please leave notes in your disavow as well. ;
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  Clay Nichols - SEO Consultant: I would follow the exact process that +Stephen Steele ;has laid out. Great insight. ;
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  Jim Munro: I'm sorry to disagree with both Clay and Stephen but I'm not sure that annoying people with multiple emails is a smart move, they might become annoyed enough to buy you another 100,000 links on fiverr. :)
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  Justin Y: +Jim Munro agreed!
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  Clay Nichols - SEO Consultant: +Jim Munro ;It's ok to disagree. I revise my statement as well. I wouldn't necessarily spam people, but I would at least send an e-mail first. If all else fails, just disavow it. ;
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  Kim Romarez: Nice input guys :) ;