competitor's dirty tricks - and a novel approach to obfuscation

[amp3rsand]

Hi, I have a client who believes his competitors are using blackhat type techniques to hurt his rank, and also to displace his rank with their often fake, but always crappy SERP hits.
We are finding all sorts of pages that are lifting a paragraph of content from our site, and then having a link to our site.
But the quality of these sites is very low quality, porn sites, crappy recommendation sites - things like this. We believe this is hurting us.
Is this the case?

for an example - one of the links goes to a page that is actually in Mandarin. But as soon as you click translate you get the real content. This is not content that started out as mandarin and then was translated to English. They are using google translate in reverse. This is obvious as the translation is 100% accurate. I know Google Translate is good, but it isn't 100% good!!

Is this novel approach hurting us?
Why would someone do this? It's obviously obfuscation, but why?
What can we do about it?

 

[Community]

It's super hard to say without seeing some examples of the backlinks and the site it's self.

Disavow tool maybe an option here, especially for the porn type links but it would be best to audit them all and make sure it's not some kind of auto syndication which is just scraping content and referencing back. Alot of these have nothing to do with the sites they are scraping, they simply do it to get traffic and earn revenue from ads.

Not ideal obviously, but probably a different strategy required over a tangible effort of negative SEO.

How many links are we talking in a percentage compared to your high quality backlinks ?