I had this same issue and it really affected my stats. I tried to contact the website with no luck to get the links removed. Then, when i looked into it more they had linked to the same  pages about 30,000 times so I deleted the pages that were linked that I could afford to and slightly altered the addresses that I needed to keep. It made a massive difference

Hi Matthew, these are good tips but what if you have a news site with a load of different content that has been hit? You can't make sure that words don't come up more than a couple of times in titles or you would end up not writing about things. Any ideas there as we seem to be being hit with the penalty stick also.

We haven't done link building full stop and only have a few hundred links to us that are organic

I agree with your point about the aim of websites. Google penalising low text when a lot of sites are there and enjoyed by people because they are image heavy - they don't want a load of text. Or news sites, they may just want short snappy news in one place they like going to but a lot of small news sites (like my own although we have a lot of comment also) seem to be being hit.