Removal of Bad Links

[EcomLkwd]

Before I started doing SEO for the company I am currently working in, they had an Indian company doing loads of spammy SEO work for their site.

My question is as follows; should i try to remove the links that were inserted there. I am doing link building now in a natural way, which obviously takes days to get a link - not minutes.  I'm worried that the link profile is full of years of spammy links and I can't dilute it as fast as I would like.

Here are a few links to different sites that the company created links on: http://youdoze.com/  http://www.video-bookmark.com/   http://mylinkvault.com/  http://www.puplinks.com/  http://huzoo.com/

How do I go about this?

[TakeshiYoung]

Do you know if the company was penalized or hit with Penguin because of the bad links? If so, it makes sense to remove them, otherwise the default behavior of Google is to just ignore spammy links (every site has them).

If you need to recover from a penalty, just send polite link removal requests to the spammy sites. If they don't respond or you can't find their contact info, just disavow their links in Google Webmaster Tools. Then file a reconsideration request.

[jesse-landry]

Rachel,

This is pretty much exactly what happened to me and I've been dealing with it for about 6 months now. FIRST, I want to refer you to a Q&A I posted regarding this: http://www.seomoz.org/q/removing-unnatural-link-penalties

Next I'd like to say this - Find the service which was used to purchase these spammy links and contact them. For my company it was a site called "Submit Edge" and I was luckily able to login and download lists of articles published for us with usernames and passwords. Using these excel sheets I removed a good 300 links. That still wasn't enough and I wasn't able to remove the social media and directory links for the most part, but I knew where they were.

Use this list and attempt to contact webmasters and keep track of emails. Simply using the disavow tool will not be enough if you find you have been penalized manually. Google will want to see that you've worked hard to undo all of this.

It sounds like you haven't received a manual penalty message yet (make sure you check your GWMT daily to be sure) but there's still a chance it could come. I discovered and began trying to remove the spam links for my company's sites in late December and wasn't notified of penalty until mid-March. Luckily I had been tracking most of my efforts and am still putting together a re-inclusion request. (strangely, we have yet to see results of penalties so i'm admittedly dragging my feet a bit.)

There's also talk of a new Penguin update coming which could hurt your site when done. So the earlier you start and better you track your efforts the farther ahead you will get, I'd say.

Takeshi's advice is good. Just make sure you can show Google that you've tried really hard to identify this and fix it. That will prove to them that you know what your company did wrong and that it won't happen any more.

Good luck, keep us posted! These types of things are very interesting to me as it's what I'm dealing with daily.

[EcomLkwd]

Wow! That sounds like a huge job! Thanks for the detailed response.

Do you think that's it's almost inevitable that I will get penalized?

.

[jesse-landry]

Not necessarily inevitable. Without seeing your site and backlink profile it's hard to say. And even if I could I wouldn't say anything definitive when it comes to Google and their spam team. But I would say your gut might be telling you the chances are high, and you should listen to your gut. That's what I did and sure enough here we are... I told everyone here that it was inevitable and we were screwed and to expect a huge drop off in traffic any day now and less quote requests. None of that happened and I think/hope it's due to my efforts to rectify this issue.

It is a huge job. The good news is I get paid for it and it wasn't my doing in the first place so I get to come out the hero (if I continue to succeed). You can do the same!!

Good luck! Like I said, keep us posted.