Bad Link Removal

[TomBristol]

This guide might help:

http://www.branded3.com/b3labs/cleaning-your-links-a-step-by-step-guide/

Of course, there is also the Bing Disavow tool, but Google hasn't come out with a similar tool yet.

[Personnel_Concept]

How to find bad links:

Best way is to maintain a spreadsheet of what links you made and what anchor text you have used so far to make links. Now, If you have done this already then open each link. Now make use of seomoz bar to check the Domain Authority of that domain sending link to you. Anything less than 40 DA can not be called as high quality link (though it might still be passing some link juice).

Further, you should check whether it is a link in comment or from directory submissions. After recent Google updates both these links are considered spam in most cases and should be removed.

You should also analyse your rankings and Google Analytics data. If the organic traffic dropped after the dates when you made link and if there is any drop in the rankings after you made those links then these can be seen as the signals showing that those links might be bad links.

Few more obvious factors are If the link is coming from a site which is filled with spam, a paid link, reciprocal link are kind of links which are not good for the health of your site!

Removing Bad links:

Checkout each of the site and login to your account and either remove your account or just remove the link. Or else you can look for the author or contact person on that site and send q request letter with your login details requesting them to remove the link.

[MoosaHemani]

I guess there are many different free and paid ways of doing this you can do it manually or with the help of a tool as well... (lot of choices) but you have to take some pain to remove it no matter what and how much you spend...

Here is a post by Cyrus Shepard http://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/ that discuss different link cleanup tool. Please take a look!

Hope this helps!

[AdamThompson]

You should not remove links simply because they are less than 40 DA. Links under 40 DA are not necessarily low quality links, they just may pass less link juice.

Submissions to high quality directories are fine. Rand Fishkin and Matt Cutts have both shared insights into what constitutes a high quality directory.

It's sometimes inadvisable to try to correlate drops in traffic to link building efforts based on the date alone. Google makes dozens of updates per month, plus some algorithms like Penguin and Panda run once per month, so there are many factors and complications. Just because you built a link on Monday and your traffic dropped on Tuesday doesn't mean it was because of the link. Sometimes this might be true, but I recommend being very cautious when drawing such conclusions.

[Personnel_Concept]

Like I mentioned, If you read it carefully, it says in bracket- (though it might still be passing some link juice).  But then there are many other factors too which will decide whether links is good quality or bad quality.

[Personnel_Concept]

Thanks for the link. It has some nice tools. I might try them out.

[tanveer1]

Thanks for the reply.

I didn't receive any kind of unnatural link notice from google. The only thing I found was in my webmaster googlebot was not able to access the robots.txt file for several days. Could this be the problem?

[TomBristol]

What SERP phenomenon are you experiencing?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

If you're looking for a more automated solution, or tools to assist, here's a summary of the tools mentioned in the post:

1. rmoov

2. Link Cleanup and Contact

3. Remoove’em

4. DeleteBacklinks.com

You can also use any number of services to dig out bad links, including Open Site Explorer or Majestic, but the aforementioned Link Cleanup and Contact tool is among the best.

After identifying bad links, many webmasters leverage Mechanical Turk to find contact information and even write emails.

These are just a few of the ways to tackle the problem - there are undoubtedly many more. Find the solution that best works for you.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[joebuilder]

The Link Cleanup and Contact tool is dead. Just send me to a page that says sign in with twitter and when I try that it goes to a dead page.