Link Detox or I can use Open Site Explorer for tracking down bad links?

[VinceWicks]

Here's the thing. I need to find bad external links pointing to my site. Is Link Detox the only option or I can actually use Open Site Explorer for that. If OSE is an option, please give me an idea how I need to go about it. Thanks.

[TomRayner]

Hi Vince

You can certainly use OSE, but it will be more of a manual process on your end.  You'd need to go into the links in the OSE report for yourself, possibly starting with those with low PA/DA scores or exact match anchor text, and then making your own judgement on whether the link is bad or not.

With Link Detox, it runs through your backlink profile (it's a bit more thorough than OSE as well I've found) and then classifies the links for you, in terms of "health".  You should always check a few of the results yourself to see if you agree, but it's usually pretty accurate in its diagnosis.

With OSE, you don't get that automatic diagnosis, so Link Detox is pretty unique in that case.  If you haven't spotted it, you can pay a one off fee of €50 to run 2 audits - just follow this link.  There's no contract with this plan so you can test it and see if you like it.  Usually much more cost efficient for individual sites.

Hope this helps!

[GregB123]

I'll second what Tom said. I used Link Detox's $50 for two audits plan a few times and it worked great. I even screwed up the first run by having some settings wrong, emailed their Help Desk, and they re-credited me the botched run.

If you already have collected a list of backlinks from other sources (Moz, Google or Bing Webmaster Tools, Ahref, Majestic, etc) you can also append that list to your audit. Link Detox finds most links anyways, but appending your own list makes it VERY complete.

They even have a feature where later you can append your Disavow file and the Link Detox system marks any matches so you don't have to keep reviewing those bad links. I keep hoping that MOZ and other analysis programs will add a feature where we can append our Disavow file so our link-based statistics will match what Google sees when they factor in the Disavow file.

[Chris661]

Also a fan of Link Detox as I just used it and agree it found links OSE did not. After determining the links I wanted to target for removal, I used RMOOV for an email campaign and Disavow list. RMOOV is a really slick tool to contact webmasters and create a record in the form of a Google Docs spreadsheet of your efforts. This could be sent to the Google Web Spam team for support in a reconsideration request. Both tools make this process much simpler than some of the manual methods I've seen described here. Now I'm waiting to be forgiven!

[MichaelC-15022]

Recognize that there are three major types of "bad" backlinks that you need to look for:

• sitewides
• over-optimized anchor text
• links from really stinky places

Link Detox is great--I use it all the time to diagnose penalty issues.  BUT it only really helps with links from spammy domains--it won't help you spot over-optimized anchor text.  I use OSE's anchor text tab to do that.

To spot sitewides, you'll probably want to download the entire backlink profile from OSE into a spreadsheet, then sort by domain, and look for massive blocks of links from the same domain.