Huge diifference linking root domains in SEO MOZ and opensite explorer

[nimble]

Hi there, I have  fairly large site that has never really been optimised. I think an old forum i hosted has either been spammed or my webmaster at the time used some black hat techniques to get me more root linking domains. I am a newbie and would really appreciate if someone could just quickly look at my donain and confirm that this is a problem and something i should fix before i start my SEO campaign. I am also worried this will negatively effect my domain authority.

I dont really want to broadcast my domain so if anyoone would be so kind to confirm the problem so i cant start to research the answer.

Thanks v much

[Copstead]

If you want to email me your domain I will take a quick look.  copstead@gmail.com

[nimble]

awesome thank you, i have replied via email

[Copstead]

Taking a quick look you have a ton of spammy bad links coming in and they are going to internal existing, and non existing pages.

57 - Linking domains to home page

3,766 - Linking domains to all pages

You have a lot of cleanup to do.  I would start by setting up your account with Google Webmaster Tools and running an internal scan to start cleaning up everything.

[nimble]

Hey Brent, cheers as i thought.

I already have webmaster tools there are 186 crawl errors under not found and 7 under mobile not found. Do i need to apply to have all of these removed? Will this remove these spammy backlinks.

Also hope you dont mind one more question.

My domains are currently structured like this www.mydomain.com/index.php/page-alias

I want to change them to this format www.mydomain.com/folder/page-alias.htm

Seeing that 95% of my backlinks are to my homepage  would not change and the site doesn't rank on many keywords except the brand am i right in thinking  now id a good time to make this change with a view as a starting point for my SEO

Does this make sense?

Thanks very much

[Copstead]

The first thing I would focus on would be the url restructure of the site.

- www.mydomain.com/folder/page-name/

Then 301 all old urls to the new urls

Then start the cleanup of inbound links.

[nimble]

Hey Brent sorry each answer seems to lead to another question. Last one

when you say  "Then start the cleanup of inbound links." Could you point me in the direction i need to look into doing this?

Cheers

[Copstead]

When you are ready to start, you should run a report with www.opensiteexplorer.org and export all of your inbound links to an excel spreadsheet.  That way you can sort them by the PA and DA and start figuring out how to contact the website to get the link removed.

Or if that isn't an option, it may be best to let a lot of those bad links 404 on your site so Google knows that those pages don't exist.

But cleanup your internal structure, setup XMl sitemaps, and make sure there are no errors (internally).

[nimble]

Thanks so much Brent . Really appreciate your time. Will get onto this