Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?

[Kingalan1]

Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains.

Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones?

My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place.

For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Alan

[Burto]

I think it really does not matter but personally I would focus on cleaning up your link profile then focus on your quality content to gain natural links and social shares.

You can reach out to other web masters to achieve links but honestly (if you have a manual penalty) I would be focusing my time and efforts on getting the penalty lifted first.

[jlane9]

Well,

If you say a lot of the links have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. Then I would not be worried about removing these links affecting your Da or Pa. They have zero trust flow.

I would def. get rid of sites you think are giving you a penalty. If you need a site review to remove a manual penalty, They will be wanting to see that you made an effort to clean up the bad link profile, not just added some new links.

As well if your site is under a manual penalty, then the new links you build may not be allowed to flow trust fully to your credit.

I would spend a few weeks cleaning up bad links than after that split the time half and half building new high quality links and removing the bad ones.

Hope that helps.

[ChrisDyson]

It's difficult to say whether these links are helping or hindering at the moment  - by the sounds of it the report the SEO agency ran was a Link Detox report and the results are purely automated, while I have a lot of faith in the tools from LRT I wouldn't be 100% confident with the results as some of the links may be giving a false positive... however you will most likely be talking about a small change ratios.

Ultimately there is a potential problem if you haven't received a warning yet, so I would look to remove as many of these links as possible - as soon as possible.