How to Identify and Remove Bad Links

There’s no arguing with the fact that it’s been a rough couple of months for webmasters and SEOs alike.  In addition to being pummeled by various Panda and Penguin updates and refreshes, Google has been investing significant resources into stepping up its monitoring and penalization of low value link building strategies.

Even if your site hasn’t received one of the unprecedented number of unnatural links warnings issued recently by the search giant, it’s worth taking some time to evaluate your site’s backlink profile and remove low value links at this point.  Given the recent push we’ve seen recently by Google and the other search engines to weed web spam out of their natural search results, there’s no reason to believe that these are the only link-oriented penalties we’ll see.

Step #1 – Analyze your backlink profile

In general, there are two different scenarios that should prompt a further evaluation of your backlink profile with the intention of identifying and removing penalty links:

  • You’ve received a notice from Google in your Webmaster Tools account indicating that unnatural link building practices have been detected on your website, or
  • You’re concerned that the low value link building practices you’ve engaged in in the past could leave your site vulnerable to future Google algorithm changes.

In either case, you’ll need to start with a tool that allows you to discover and export a list of all the different backlinks pointing at your website.  My favorite tools for this purpose include Majestic SEO, the Open Site Explorer, Linkody and Ahrefs – and although there are fees associated with using each of these programs, I believe it’s money well spent in terms of protecting your site’s future natural search performance.

Once you’ve set up an account with your data provider of choice, you’ll want to take a look at the following variables associated with the links in your backlink profile:

  • Are the sites pointing at you legitimate websites or do they appear to have been built for SEO?  Links built on sites that appear to have no value beyond providing a place for link builders to leave their referral text should be obvious targets for removal when it comes to improving the quality of your backlink profile.
  • Does your anchor text distribution focus too highly on SEO keywords?  Because the search engines value natural links, patterns of tightly-distributed, keyword-oriented anchor texts may be especially susceptible to link penalties.
  • Where on the page of each referring site are your links located?  In-content links represent the link building gold standard of SEO these days, as they’re perceived by the search engines to represent editorial votes from site owners.  Sitewide links or footer links, on the other hand, reside in site locations deemed the most vulnerable to SEO manipulation.

To conduct this analysis, you’ll find that it’s easiest to export your backlink profile data to a spreadsheet, where you can note which links are most likely to appear suspicious in the eyes of the search engines.

Step #2 – Determine which penalty links should be removed

At this point, you should have a list of low value links that could potentially lead your website to be penalized by Google and the other search engines.

However, before you run off and start contacting every webmaster who’s hosting one of your penalty links, you’ll want to take a few more steps to ensure that you aren’t wasting your effort on links that won’t actually cause any ill effects. Check out WooCommerce Hosting for assistance on this.

Specifically, you’ll want to find the following pieces of information about each low value link before beginning the removal process:

  • Is the link still active on the referring page?  Things change all the time in the world of SEO, so it’s possible that the link in question isn’t even active any longer.  Take the time to open the page listed by your backlink profile data generation program and see if you can find the link, either on-page or in its source code.  If you can’t find the link, the search engines can’t either.
  • Does the link have the “rel=nofollow” attribute added to it?  If so, you don’t need to worry about link removal, as the search engines aren’t counting the PageRank passed through the link anyways.
  • Does the page have a meta robots “nofollow” tag in its head section?  Even if individual links aren’t tagged with the appropriate attributes, you may find that site owners have instructed the search engine spiders to ignore the links on an entire page from the perspective of transmitting PageRank.

If the low value links you identified in Step #1 meet the above criteria, you can safely ignore them for now.  However, if your analysis reveals links that fail both the quality standards outlined in Step #1 and the search engine treatment guidelines listed above in Step #2, you’ll want to take action to have them either changed or removed.

Step #3 – Contact link-hosting webmasters or link building partners

Now that you know which inbound links could be contributing to current or future link-related penalties, you’ll want to take action to minimize their presence in your backlink profile.  Keep in mind that you have several different options here:

  • You can ask the webmaster to remove the link entirely
  • You can ask that the webmaster change the link’s anchor text to either a branded keyword phrase or something natural like, “Click here”
  • You can ask that the webmaster add the appropriate “nofollow” tag to your backlink

To get in touch with the webmasters hosting your potential penalty links, either use the contact form found on the referrer’s website or use Voila Norberts email finder service to find the email address associated with the website’s hosting account.  Alternatively, if you used a service to create links that you now believe to be low quality, contact the service or contractor in question directly to address the removal or modification of your links.

When contacting webmasters or link-building services, it’s best to be upfront about your circumstances.  Most people attempting to carry out link removal campaigns have seen the best results by stating directly that they’re webmasters looking to either remove or protect against Google penalties before specifying the action they’d like to occur.

However, be aware that link removal isn’t an easy process.  Not all webmasters will respond to your removal request, while even fewer still will take the action you request.  In some cases, webmasters may require payment in order to remove your links (though it’s up to you if you want to go down this road).  As a result, you may find that it’s a viable option to simply scrap an already-penalized website in order to start fresh with better link building techniques.

Whatever the case may be, the best thing you can do for yourself throughout the removal request process is to carefully document every move you make.  If you contact a webmaster, make a note on your spreadsheet of how and when the contact occurred.  Even if you aren’t able to remove your low quality links entirely, the documentation you compile throughout the process may be enough to have your penalties lifted if you decide to pursue a reconsideration request with Google.

Image: jonathanb1989

Entrepreneur & Digital Marketing Strategist

I build and grow SaaS companies.

“When it comes to marketing, Sujan is the best. I’ve never met someone with such creative tactics and deep domain knowledge not just in one channel, but in every flavor of marketing. From content, to scrappy guerrilla tactics, to PR, Sujan always blows my mind with what he comes up with.”

RYAN FARLEY Co-Founder of Lawn Starter

Comment (10) - Cancel Reply

Michal at Custom Developer Agency 151 months ago

When the links placed us competitive? I have no influence on these links…

Reply
12 Questions to Ask Before Taking on SEO Clients | Search Engine Journal 150 months ago

[…] a site to recover from a past penalty can range from being difficult to downright impossible. And while I’m not saying that you should […]

Reply
12 Questions to Ask Before Taking on SEO Clients | zdiig.com 149 months ago

[…] a site to redeem from a past penalty can operation from being formidable to officious impossible. And while I’m not observant that we […]

Reply
Ravi Kant Singh 147 months ago

Very Nice Questions, I like it.

Thanks

Reply
الوسيط 142 months ago

Howdy, Awesome write-up. Likely to concern with your website in web adventurer, might click here? Web browser is still the marketplace director and also a substantial part of people will leave your amazing producing for that reason challenge.

Reply
saudi dedicated server hosting 140 months ago

I do agree with all the ideas you have offered for your post. They’re very convincing and will definitely work. Nonetheless, the posts are very quick for newbies. May you please extend them a little from subsequent time? Thanks for the post.

Reply
shortness of breath 140 months ago

Hello there I am so grateful I found your website, I really found you
by error, while I was searching on Yahoo for something else, Anyhow I am here now and would just like
to say kudos for a fantastic post and a all round thrilling
blog (I also love the theme/design), I don’t have time to read it all at the minute but I have book-marked it and also added in your RSS feeds, so when I have time I will be back to read a lot more, Please do keep up the great work.

Reply
Alberto 140 months ago

Then on Saturday it was back. Throughout the hearing, Price sought to portray Escalona
as a liar, a monster and an unfit mother with a history of violence, and Price has repeatedly referred to her as a” monster.

Reply
DrqhyA7uwV 139 months ago

719059 702675Hello, Neat post. There is an issue along with your site in web explorer, could test this

Reply
Venus 132 months ago

Please let me know if you’re looking for a writer for your
site. You have some really great posts and I believe I would be a
good asset. If you ever want to take some of the load off, I’d absolutely love
to write some content for your blog in exchange for a link back to
mine. Please send me an e-mail if interested. Kudos!

Reply