How to deal with spammy sites in SERPS?

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

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  Guillaume Boucher Bélanger: WTF Google!!!!
  
  Sorry about that but seriously!!! I'm currently working for a nail salon in Quebec city and I've been dropping ranks for the past month without knowing what to do next. ; The url is lafeedelongle(dot)ca.
  
  I respect all of Google's guide lines and I still see shitty website with no content and with tiltles as long as my house being rank second or first in ; "pose d'ongles québec" or "formation pose d'ongles québec"
  
  I tried my best cleaning the more spammy links going to the site but I guess Google didn't notice the links beeing removed because they still are in the Webmaster tools for this particular stie.
  
  Can some one help me with that even if it's in French?
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  Sitegains: Have you lost rankings since Oct 4th? If so you need a penguin refresh for your recent link clean up to work...
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  Guillaume Boucher Bélanger: Yeah I've lost ranking since october 4th and what do you mean by a penguin refresh?
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  Matt Hintze: Man, you're site is awesome too.  ;
  
  There's so many angles you can approach, but writing fresh content regularly, that's partially query-based seems to be what Google is eating up right now, at least for my company's clients.  ;Yeah, I agree with +Sitegains ; ;try to clean those up, but it's not a guarantee it will be fixed.  ;It's hard to rank without engaging content right now.
  
  You have several links with a "|" in it.  ;That's an obvious sign to Google that you or you're SEO specialist are using spintax, and they hate it, because...it works.
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  Cheng Mao: go ahead