Removal of "bad" incoming links

[MarkWill]

I have had my site registered for a long time (since January 1995) and in that time we have built a good number of incoming links. We have a vendor database that we expose as a service to our visitors, which numbers around 5,500. These sites vary dramatically from low-end, Mom-and-Pop type web sites (some ugly in the extreme :)) to nationwide, established vendors.

Back in the day, we had the basic tactic to request a link to our site if the vendor wanted to be listed in our vendor database. We stopped that practice years ago but still have many sites linking to us.

The quality of some of these sites is very poor. I want to come up with a strategy for dealing with these. To that end, some questions:

• How "costly", from an SEO perspective, is a poor quality site that links to our site?
• What metric(s) should be used to assess the quality of sites linking to us?
• If possible, for the aforementioned metric is there a "bar" we might try to hit? For example, would it be useful to request removal of links where <metric>is less than x? What is x?</metric>
• Given that we have thousands to assess, is there any report I can create to identify these sites?
• Is it generally preferred to have vendors link simply to our home page or is it more effectice to have them link to particular pages on our site (each vendor can generally be associated with a "topic" on our site).

In short, I am willing to go through this process if there is real value in it.

Thanks.

Mark

[AlanMosley]

I would not try to remove the bottom level as any sites with lots of links should have
some bad ones. I would be more concerned with unnatural linking patterns, if
you have 90% of your links coming from blog comments, then I think you may have
a problem, but from the sounds of it I would not worry at all. Unless they are
porn sites or the like, even then you would have to have a high level to raise
a flag. I think you may end up doing yourself more damage than good.