Link removal... are you doing it?

[JS_Electric]

How shall I know about the backlinks to my site are good or bad. Is there any method or tool to find these?

[SteveGerencser]

But what do you do if they don't comply?

If they don't comply the reaction depends on the links. Most of the smaller quantity links are simply ignored. But we had one person who was out of control and refused to take down any links. (we are talking over 1000 across 300+ domains). We had to create a referrer based redirect that took any traffic from those links and 'disposed' of it. Google seemed fine with that response on our part.

- - - Updated - - -

I doubt it.... removing links is no easy task and very time consuming. OK if you have hundreds of links from the footer of a single website you may be able to get rid of them, but hundreds of single links from shoddy directories are likely to be there for as long as the directory is.

Having tackled a spread sheet full of shoddy link locations, wasted hours and got nowhere... I'd rather spend my time trying to find better quality links.

Automation can not only build links, it can remove them as well.

- - - Updated - - -

How shall I know about the backlinks to my site are good or bad. Is there any method or tool to find these?

No, there is no tool because any tool will only 'guess'. It requires a human to decide if a link is good or not. And that threshold is different for every niche and every site.

[C0ldf1re]

... hundreds of single links from shoddy directories are likely to be there for as long as the directory is...

It will take a lot to convince me that such links will harm your website. Google may well give them no weight, but why should there be a penalty? Google are hardly likely to make it easy for people to damage their competitors' websites by creating bad links for their competitors.

(Please correct me if I am wrong!)

[SteveGerencser]

As we have been saying for years, even though so many refuse to hear us, it's not always about the type of like as much as thresholds. If you have 20k links and a few hundred of them are directory links, no problem. If you have 20k links and 19,900 of them are directories, you have a problem. The same goes for nofollow. If the niche/search vertical 'in general' shows a 25% nofollow ratio and your site in that same niche/serach vertical has a 2% nofollow, you have a problem.

It is not, and never has been, about single links or link types. It's about trends, groupings, and thresholds. This is why people that focus on specific niches tend to do better than those that don't. They have a better understanding of what others in their niche are doing and how much they can push the envelope. We (William and I and others) said this 5 or 6 years ago when we first told everyone of our testing that showed it was possible to push a site out of the index. The only thing that has changed since then is that it has become easier and Google admits it's possible.

[LD]

Automation can not only build links, it can remove them as well.

This, is very interesting. Can you share more insight into the automation part?

[C0ldf1re]

... If the niche/search vertical 'in general' shows a 25% nofollow ratio and your site in that same niche/serach vertical has a 2% nofollow, you have a problem...

Ah, thresholds! That's a very insightful post. Perhaps I have been making some very silly mistakes in my testing of how to beat Google.

Suppose I have a test website which I have zoomed high on serps for a pretty uncompetitive keyphrase, by using my own unique version of wicked SEO techniques. This includes having 100% dofollow inbound links, but arranging things a little differently to any way that I have seen used before.

So far, I have been gloating over my success, but perhaps I have just been deluding myself. Perhaps Google were just ignoring me because my website wasn't big enough to pass a threshold test.

Is it possible that Google has considered my 2K inbound links as statistically insignificant, and not thoroughly analyzed my site? But if I scale things up to 20K links, might Google just chew up my website and spit it out of serps?

[michellebc]

A new client I have received an email titled "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links..."
So, yes , I have started contacting website owners and asked them to remove links.
Seems like they are unused membership sites full with backlinks created for SEO purposes
I had some success. Some of the website owners even thanked me for pointing that out

[SteveGerencser]

Yes some of my searches show listings from forums that I posted to years ago.

This is probably because they are high profile sites.

But I don't think they are relavent to people searching for me these days.

So How can I remove these ?

There is no reason to remove them.

[ShorePatrol]

We started doing site recovery and forensics back in January. The manual penalty had been in place for about 2 years at that point so it was pre- penguin / panda. There was a lot to do to the site and we decided to clean up the link profile while we were at it. Then Penguin hit so we were way ahead of the game. Even though the penalty has been lifted we still want to get about 10k more links removed just to clear any threshold issues that may linger.

Steve,

One dumb question -

1) How do you know (or how do you find out) if a site is being penalized? (let alone how long it's been being penalized)

Thanks!

[dburdon]

I've been asked to sort out some links a client put in without my knowledge. But I've yet to asked to remove any links we've put in.