Is removing inorganic links a bad idea?

[timscullin]

Hey there,

We have recently been in touch with a SEO agency that recomended we remove all inorganic links from our backlink profile.

Most of the links are pretty good but there are some news sites that have sitewide links to our site. The link is in the nav menu, as a useful link. We didn't ask for this link it was totally organic.

Also some link building in the past was focused on anchor text so some of the keywords may have been over emphasised.

Is it a good idea to go about removing all of the potentially inorganic looking links?

My concern is that we wipe out links that google are actually valuing. I still know sites are ranking #1 with much more dubious backlink profiles, and then there's this guy who removed his sitewide backlinks and dropped in his ranking:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/removed-site-wide-links

If a competitor decided to add negative links to our site, it would take longer to find and remove negative links than it would for them to add them. It seems odd that google would allow negative SEO to be that easy..

What do you think?

[TakeshiYoung]

Have you received any warnings in Google Webmaster Tools or seen a drop in ranking for keywords that are targeted in the sitewide links? If not, I would not remove any links, as they could be passing link juice. If you ever receive a link warning, then I would consider disavowing or removing links at that time.

[irvingw]

I would look at the sites linking to you (always a good practice) and if you see any really dodgy ones have them removed. I wouldn't go removing all of your links if you have not incurred a penalty. I'd use that effort on getting new good links to improve your link profile.

[timscullin]

Yeah that was my feeling too.

However their response is that we are being algorithmically penalized because we have a 10,000's of links from 100's of domains, so a large amount of those links are potentially site wide.

(1 site for example has 100,000's pages with us in their main sitewide navigation).

So to move forward with our SEO work we first need to remove the links that appear inorganic.

Could this be possible or do links only need to be removed when you have a link warning?

[timscullin]

Thanks Irving. The issue isn't so much about removing all the links, but rather what to do with sitewide ones that provide a disproportionate amount of links from one domain.

Should they be dealt to, we could ask them to remove it or make it nofollow, or should we just roll on with the rest of our SEO work, and only respond to that issue if we see a manual penalty?

You're right about dodgey ones too, definitely worth dealing to them now.

[TakeshiYoung]

What keyword are they using to link to you? Have you noticed that your rankings have dropped for that keyword? If it's an exact anchor text match keyword, you could consider asking them to change it to your brandname, but again only if you believe that link is negatively impacting you.

It also depends on how robust your link profile is. If you already have thousands of links, then 1 site with a sitewide link probably won't impact you that much, compared to if you have a relatively small link profile.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

How much traffic is this site wide link providing?  None?  Deal with it!  Tons? Leave it be.

[timscullin]

Yeah it's linked with our company name so not too dodgey

We also have other sites linking sitewide with our logo, also not paid, just people are saying we are good place to get info from. Some of these are in the sidebar so could look like paid ads..

We have 10,000 links from 350 domains in OSE. Probably 97% of those links are organic. Do you think that would be causing an impact?

[timscullin]

There isn't much traffic at all as the link is actually in a sub-sub-menu in the nav (the strange things people do).

But I'm more concerned whether removing the link will actually have a negative effect on our SEO