Can bad links be removed from a website

[Barb123]

An SEO company we contracted with linked us up with many poor quality sites - some in foreign countries and now our site has hundreds and thousands of poor quality links to inappropriate sites..  Is there any way to un-link from these?

Thank you!

[SEO-Doctor]

You need to contact the sites directly or tell the SEO Company to do it. Its much harder undoing low quality links than building them!!

[Andrea.G]

If these are links TO other poor quality sites from your site then you should be able to just take them out of the code. If they're links FROM the poor quality sites, then yes, like Gareth said it's a matter of actually getting in contact with the webmasters and requesting to be removed.

[poolguy]

I agree with Gareth, it's extremely difficult to impossible in many cases to have these backlinks removed from other sites.  I had the same thing happen to a company and have spent countless hours emailing websites and their hosts with little success and to this day have probably only had 10-20% of them removed.  I've had to force myself to forget about them and simply try harder to achieve high quality backlinks to neutralize the negative effects of the bad ones.

Needless to say, it's a sucky position to be in... be careful about hiring an SEO company.  There are more bad ones than good.