"Bad" backlinks

[hochzeitsfotograf]

Hello dear community,

I am new here and quite new to SEO. Perhaps someone could give me a hint on a following question:

Which tools can help me to track "bad" baclinks, e. g. links which would rather downgrade my SEO performance?

[TomRayner]

A really good one to start off with is LinkDetox.

You can pay for a full crawl of your site's backlinks with a single tweet.

It will break your backlinks into three categories: toxic, suspicious and healthy.  Healthy are obviously A-OK.  Toxic are links from sites that have been deindexed - these are clear-cut "bad badlinks".

The suspicious links come in a variety of categories themselves, indicating why the tool thinks they are suspicious.  Some links might be bad, but some might be OK.  It's important, therefore, to read through the tool's reasoning for making it suspicious and see if you agree, as well as cross referencing it with some SEOMoz metrics such as PA/DA.

Hope you have fun with the tool - for the price of one tweet, I'd say it's definitely worth it.

[irvingw]

here is a very handy tool.

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

it flags sites that are linked to on the site that is linking to you (you enter the URL of site that is linking to you)

you need to look through the links for false positives, because "essex" will trigger "sex" for instance.

[MarieHaynes]

At the risk of sounding cliche, I would say that the best tool I use is my brain.  

Any automated tool is going to have some false negatives and false positives.

I think the answer to your question though lies in why you are going through this type of audit.

If you've got an unnatural links warning then you've got to take every link that even smells slightly unnatural and toss it.

If you think you've been affected by Penguin (organic traffic drop that coincides with Apr 24, May 25 or Oct 5) then go after links that you have made using keyword anchor text.

If you're just trying to clean things up, then it's debatable on what to do.  If you prune a bunch of links you could do more harm than good.  I would start by looking at anchor text abuse and remove some of those links.  But I think it's impossible to give general advice on what to do for your site without knowing how you have done SEO in the past.

If you've never engaged in link building but have naturally earned links to your site then I wouldn't even bother trying to clean things up.  Even the whitest of white sites will have a few spammy links.  But if you didn't make them then I wouldn't worry about them.

[lbohen]

I ran a LinkDetox report and it found 61 toxic back links and 960 suspicious back links to www.audiobooksonline.com. We have NOT received any messages from Google WMT about bad links.

According to the report I should immediately get rid of the 61 toxic links. Can our robots.txt file be used to disallow these links?

Although NOT included in the LinkDetox report, Google WMT shows 30,198 back links from wn.com. Google Analytics shows we have received no visitors from wn.com (1/1/2012 - 1/25/2013). I have no idea why wn.com would be linking to us. What benefit do they get?

[hochzeitsfotograf]

Thanks for your replies! Gee, I thought things are easier

@ Marie no I havent got a google warning nor were my search results downgraded by penguin update.
After talking with a few SEO companies and receiving astronomical offers I have decided to keep trying myself.
A am currently doing a lot of different activities and after on-page optimizing am trying to improve backlinking.
I have reached great results over the last few week, but I am constantly thinking that I might make some dummy mistakes Since I have heard that google is downgrading or even punishing sites with backlinks it considers bad, I thought there might be an eays way to check it before problems occur.

@Tom Thanks, I have found LinkDetox just before posting my question here and have just tried it out. Something sort of I have meant with my question. Unfortunately, for a buck it doesn't provide a full information.

@Irving Thanks, an interesting tool. Checking every single domain linking to me should be quite time consuming. Strange that the engine would report "essex" positive - I hope that google itself is not that stupid.