Is your link removal team incompetent?

[danailo]

In the recent spate of Google's anti "easy" link updates, also known as Penguin , link removal has become an essential part of SEO.

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There are many reasons to remove a link:

1. The link was OK when you got it, but is now "toxic" due to the siteowner allowing too much spam, paid posting, or even by default of the site being hacked and injected with non-safe content
2. Directories were great at one point to increase the low end volume of a sites link profile, and one could argue that they didn't add much value, however I believe they did, especially varying anchor text, building branded anchor text, and as a necessary "noise" in the link profile. However they were abused and the latest round of Penguin have actively targeted "Made for SEO" directories. We have seen thousands being deindexed.
3. You bought links. Needs no explanation except that you have been caught. You need to remove them .
4. You got hit by a negative attack. It used to happen before, but now that the genie is out of the bag, everyone seems to see negative attacks happening.
5. You over optimised your anchor text - the last Penguin update definitely lowered the threshold for anchor optimisation - aggressive anchor links were hurt badly in some results we were tracking.

There may be other reasons, but the above are my top five.
To be honest there isn't a hard and fast rule, but in the last few months, I have worked on isolating a few factors when looking at a sites backlink profile, and I normally begin by isolating and classifying links into some predefined sets, and the higher the overlap, the more time I spend on those link removals:

1. Directories
2. Pure Anchor Links
3. Sites with a "Gray Bar" (ie. No page rank - note NOT PR 0, but PR non existent)
4. Sitewide links
5. Sites with an obvious "buy link" note
6. Common IPs / C Classes
7. Followed vs no followed links
8. Links running through redirects (pass juice?)

The process would be then to run majority of these through a number of manual checks:

1. Is the anchor deserved and natural?
2. The sites in the GrayBar, how long have they existed? If for over a year or so, and have no PR, then they would be suspect.
3. What are the domain drop dates if any?
4. Are there and "Buy links" notes on the site?
5. Too many guest posts?

... and many many more depending on the type of the link. A lot of this work can actually be sped up by using tools such as Link Risk, who score the links. The scoring helps in concentrating on the really high risk ones.

Full article

 

[verilix]

People actually remove links? I just build more. :44:

 

[scrapebo]

If you build strong pr5+ link you wont ever need to worry about seo update! XD

 

[CyberDragon]

Wow! That's a lot of great information! Thanks!

 

[HP.Bryce]

Verilix, I agree. Taking care of someone else s shoddy work it I go with the old expression for toxic spill clean-up, "Dilution is the Solution."

 

[gorang]

People actually remove links? I just build more. :44:

Diluting the current link profile does seem like the best option.

 

[danailo]

People actually remove links? I just build more.

It is good to keep an eye on your link profile and to clean bs links.

 

[gorang]

If I had a top paying client with a bad link profile, this is definitely an option.

 

[yogi31286]

thanks for the info. Yes, sometimes if you're not able to remove link then just BUILD new high quality links. That's how it will work IMO

 

[verilix]

It is good to keep an eye on your link profile and to clean bs links.

There are plenty of times where you won't be able to get in contact with website owners to remove your link. In that case, are you screwed? Or do you just build more links?

 

[danailo]

It depends on if the links are fresh or old.