Links built by previous SEO company are mostly 'dead' - will this affect me?

[Danapollo]

Hi,

This is my first post/question in the forum - so apologies if this topic has already been covered - or if the question seems daft!

Here's the issue:

I have started working on two websites, and have been doing a lot of on-site work, increasing valuable content, etc... I'm now slowly moving onto more off-site stuff and have noticed that a lot of the backlinks to both websites (built by SEO companies before I got here) are 'dead' and simply return 404 errors (yet they still show up in site explorer).

I'll be honest, the links aren't great; the SEO companies have taken the word 'relevant' and completely re-defined it in their books!

Will these links - from sites that aren't relevant... but are dead - have any impact on my SEO efforts from now on? Or should I treat these sites as a kind of 'clean slate' and work on building the brand naturally through social media and user experience, etc?

Also - I'm re-structuring the internal pages of the site... would it be worth re-directing the old URLs (with all the dead in-bound links - that may have suffered a -50 penalty) to the new ones, or just start fresh with the new pages?

Any advice, tips or stories to share (relevant ones, of course!) will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Nick

[BedeFahey]

I'd check out whether Google still has the linking pages cached before making a decision (at least some of them). If Google has recrawled them since they went "dead" you may not have a decision to worry about

Are the sites completely irrelevant and spammy, or decent but completely off topic?

[Dan-Petrovic]

1. If the SEO company has the ability to easily remove those links then you don't want them anyway.
2. Sadly, you may experience a slight drop, depending on your overall link profile.
3. On a positive note, you likely have a much cleaner link profile now.

[Danapollo]

I'll run a check over them today and find out.

A lot of the links seem to be parked domains or errors - see moldovanembassy (.org) (.uk) and ishouldknowthis (.) (com) - don't want to link to it, so do the relevant bracket removals!

The sites are completely irrelevant, which is mega frustrating. Really not focusing on link building when the profile is so 'varied', so I'm going to focus on on-site work and providing real content for people to like, share, etc.

[Danapollo]

I think the drop has already happened - so that's why I'm re-writing/improving the content for that area of the site and just starting fresh with it.

I'm sure with the right bit of promoting (through social media, etc.) the new section will pick up a bit of traffic.

It's a tough decision about the re-direct though - because the SEOMoz Page Authority for the affected pages is close to 50.

Thanks for your replies guys - really appreciate the insight!