What if you are attacked by link spam?

[anush]

Problem is, if the victim is proactive, and knows they’re under attack, they’ll use tools like Kerboo LinkRisk, Moz Pro’s Spam Score, Link Detox, etc. to analyze their profiles and disavow the craptastic stuff.
If you got YOURSELF into a penalty, you’d use these sorts of tools to find your naughty links, get toxic ones removed, disavow the ones you couldn’t, and get any paid links you wanted to keep no-follow.
Once a link is gone, it can’t hurt you, right?

It probably can. Here’s what seems to happen:

• Google crawls a page with a link on it on some other site
  
• The page starts to 404, or maybe the site starts returning a 500 or 502 error
  
• In general, when this happens, Google (rightly, I say) thinks that the problem is probably temporary, and eventually, the page will be fixed…and until then, it can think about the page as if it has the same content on it that it saw last time it successfully fetched the page.
  

Don't unnecessarily confuse OP.

If a link is identified as bad then just disavow the link or the domain, that's it.