How to decide which links to remove.

[ThridHour]

I manage the seo for a bunch of different websites. We currently have a problem with links from low quality sources.... way too many of them and then way too much exact match anchor text.

We have a lot of sites that we basically linked together (blog network) and we are in the process of correcting this. We know we have a lot of links we need to remove and/or anchor text we need to rewrite. My question is how do I know which ones to remove and/or edit. I know that having some links from low quality sources isn't bad, or links from some other sites you own, or having some exact match anchor text. I know this isn't all bad, and some of it is expected but we have a LOT of this going on.

So basically I need to make decisions on each and every link as to whether we want to keep it, edit the anchor text, nofollow it, or delete it. I'm just not sure of what the best action is that should to be taken for each link. Any help would be really appreciated.

http://jesus.christ.org/

If you browse around on there you will see what I'm talking about with the low quality links, or if you run it through open site explorer you will really see what I mean

Thank you, I hope to get some responses soon.

[BBW]

One of the first things I would check is if the domain the link is coming from is indexed in Google. This is usually a sign the domain has been penalised.

You can do this with a quick 'site:example.com'

[zoicaremus]

Hi moregood,

If I were you I would do it the other way around:

I would go over all the existing links asking the following question:

Is this an "editorial" link?

And I would cut out all the rest.

I think It's easier to find out the good ones. There are a lot of reasons for which links could be bad for you, you might not even be aware why they are bad. But the good ones are pretty obvious and way fewer :). I think it's easier to recover from a penalty this way, and the chance to cut something good is pretty low. If you go the way you mentioned and avoid cutting the ones that are in a gray area, you might resubmit the website over and over. It will take a lot of time. Meanwhile you could stick with the good links and invest the rest of time to get more of these