What makes a backlink bad??

drumltd

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I'm trying to come up with a formula for testing backlinks, and while I realise it probably isn't as simple as if a > xxx then it's bad. I'd be interested in peoples ideas.

So far the factors I've got are.

Number of Outbound Links Not going to the target site.
Diversity of the Anchor Text Used
Domain Authority

What are peoples other ideas?
 
In the eyes of a search engine like Google, a backlink is bad if:
- it is seen coming from lots of links posted on a web page without any content
- it is one of the thousands of links pointing to a non-authority site overnight
- it comes from a site or network believed to exist mainly for selling backlinks
 
The biggest reason why backlinks are bad is spam
 
Nobody knows all google's criteria but definitely sites with lack of legitimate, google likable content and tons of outbound links will not score you any points from google.
 
Your links surrounded by duplicate content.
 
Bad quality is what you think it would be. Something that is not natural looking, something that leaves a huge SEO 'footprint'.
 
Backlink from a penalized domain?

That's a good one, didn't think of that one. I guess a rule for that one is if the domain is nolonger in google it's been penalised. - As a General Rule.
 
Forums, comments, spam, spam spam, this post, your question etc. all are bad.

This is part of my reason for investigating this further, because my site is a "reference site" I have hundreds if not thousands of forum posts about different pages on the site, which have all appeared naturally from recommendations or citations. Some of them must be good, some must be negative but how do you tell which is which??
 
Bad quality is what you think it would be. Something that is not natural looking, something that leaves a huge SEO 'footprint'.

I suppose the big one, is how do you access the quality of the site, in an easy yes/no way that anybody can understand.
 
You can add these to the list: Domain age, PR, relevance, inbound & outbound links
 
Another thought is are nofollow links just as bad. Some people say to ignore them, but really google lists them as links, so I reckon they are probably just as relevant despite what google implies\says.

What about dead links?? If a link is dead, should we disavow it??
 
You can add these to the list: Domain age, PR, relevance, inbound & outbound links

Domain age is good. I'm not sure on PR these days, it seems to me that it is getting more and more unreliable there are plenty of "bad links" on high PR sites, and vice\versa.

How do you measure relevance in an easy to understand manner??

Outbound Links I get, that's an easy one, but inbound links, does that mean if a site has spammy inbounds, that reflects badly on the outbounds (Which makes sense). If so how deep do you analysis inbound links??
 
I think " Number of outbound links from a site" is not regarded as bad back link. I think it should be called as a low level back link.

Links not relevant to the content, backlinks from penalized domain, links from spam sites, forums etc etc. and yeah, links from duplicate contents across different domains

this much i can think so far
 
Overall getting a backlink by breaking Google's guidelines is bad.
 
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