Old Non Relevant Links

[brandonschultz]

I'm currently working on a project where most of the links are from irrelevant sources referring to the site of the past domain owner.  My question is should I remove as many of these as possible or let them be for now.  My gut tells me for every new link I build that I should attempt to remove some of the old ones but I'm not exactly sure on how to proceed with this situation.  Thanks in advance for any input.

[TheeDigital]

Schultzy,

I would ask for you to define "old Non Relevent Links", if it's something that's spammy and something that you think that Google might go after in the future I would take it down.  You don't want to risk the chance of your website getting penalized in the future.

[brandonschultz]

Thanks for the quick response.  The links are not spammy per se, however the two websites have drastically different content.  To be specific, the old owner had a horse supplies company on the domain and the new one provides banking maintenance.  Most of the links point to the homepage, but again they are from sites about horses, and not about financial equipment.  Now I'm sure this happens all of the time with domain transfers, I'm just wondering if there is a best practice for keeping or removing said links, especially in the wake of the Penguin update.

[SEODinosaur]

If the links don't benefit the users they wont benefit the search engine. If these sites are linking in using [exact] math anchored text I would recommend having them take it down. If the sites are anchoring in with the URL or Brand name just leave it and focus on new relavent (helpful to users), educational, or entertaining content to link to/from.

[TheeDigital]

Schultzy,

I would remove them, if possible.  Especially if you plan on doing a lot of ecommerce related activities, because you have to remember that these links will skew your online marketing stats including page views and bounce rates.

Going back to the Penguin update though, a horse website linking to a financial institute might give off alarms within Google.  Google likes your content to be linked to relavent sites within your niche, for example a banking website to be linked to by financial websites and these links do not fit that desciption.  You might not be penalized right away, but Google will probably keep an eye on your link building activities.

[brandonschultz]

@Donnie and @TheeDesign-

Thanks for the great insights!