Is there an efficient way to use Open Site Explorer to find unnatural or harmful links

[Bryan_Loconto]

We have a new client with 8 sites that we would like to 301 to a new site. However, before doing so we want to make sure that the backlinks are not unnatural or harmful in any way.

Using open site explorer (other than just looking at exact anchor text vs brand anchor text ratio) is there a way to determine low quality inbound sites linking in? or any type of links google will find manipulative?

[mark_baird]

In my experience no.

You just have to take the time and go to each site and asses it for yourself. Its no fun but worth doing.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Thanks Mark,

What if the site has 40,000 links?

How do sites like removeem do it? Just for the initial report?

Really hoping there is a way to do this without having to spend eternity manually looking : )

[Chris.Menke]

Bryan,

Dr. Pete did a post on this a while back and it might cut some time off the project for you. http://moz.com/blog/link-profiling-with-open-site-explorer.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm honestly not sure if there's a great way to use that process to drill back into the links to see which ones are low quality - it was intended more as a big picture look at your entire profile. We're actively working on more spam detection metrics, but it's a tricky business and we're really concerned about potentially giving people false alarms, especially with so many people hacking at their links.

I know some folks use OSE to export links and pull out specific bits of data, like very low PA pages, pages with exact-match anchor text on keyword-heavy phrases (non-brand), etc., but even then you've got to be a bit careful. A low PA page isn't necessarily "bad", just relatively weak, from a link perspective.

One spam marker we've found pretty relevant is sites with a disproportionately low MozTrust to their MozRank (or to their DA). Sites with high authority but low trust may have spammy link profiles in general. These are the kinds of factors that 3rd-party link evaluation tools look at. Some of them are a good starting point, but you still need to fact-check.

I'd definitely start with some kind of domain-based analysis. Your 40K links might be coming from 4K domains, or even 400. Getting a broad sense of linking-domain quality will be an easier starting point.