Need some advice on backlinks that look bad to me

[HBFDigital]

This post is deleted!

[dotfly]

The Open Site Explorer here from moz can help you to decide if your links are/might be good or bad? The higher the authority of this site f.ex. the better the links from this site (or the less worse) ... ask yourself question like:

• has the link giving site a good quality and relevant content?
• take a look at the performance of this site (PageRank etc.)
• and similar

alternative to Open Site Explorer: http://cognitiveseo.com/

[maxweb]

Have a look at the anchor text of those links. If the website is sending 500 links with keyword targeted anchor text then it's going to look spammy as hell to google and your position in search will suffer (as I found with one of my clients). This information should be in GWT as well as open site explorer. If the anchor text is branded or just contains the url then you might be ok.

Another trick is to type cache:sikin120.net into chrome. If you receive a 404 error then it means the website is not indexed by google and should be avoided.

If you build enough links from quality websites then it might not matter. if you are worried about the impact on your website then don't be afraid to request the link to be removed and use the disavow tool if this does not work. If it is a low quality website then it will probably have little effect on your rankings if the links are removed.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

You can tell this is a spam page. Look at the footer and look at all of the links off to different sites. This is a perfect example of a site that sells text links. The same with their blog roll.

You can either contact them and ask to be removed, or just disavow them. You certainly don't want to be associated to that sort of site.

-Andy

[GPainter]

Hi there Cassandra and Welcome.

Couple of things to remember here, its very easy to look at a site and cry wolf and remove it however until you've got a penalty is it really worth removing? When I say this what i mean is the following:

Do you have loads of links that are low quality or is it just these few?

a natural link profile will have some low quality sites you can't expect a site to have just high end links it's not very natural. obviously this is not the case if you have 50% of your links that's are poor.

Do you have a penalty?

Its easy to live in fear of Google and its penalty but until you get one you shouldn't tihnk all links that come to your site are bad.

Have you done it?

What I mean by this is keep an eye on your own link building make sure you've not created the link it can happen

Other software:

There is more than Moz that can help you e.g Majestic SEO tends to have a better larger back link portfolio so it can be good for looking into different metrics. Some people like to use the likes of Link Detox to help them though this is more help and there is always the good ol' open site explorer as mentioned by Marc

Bottom Line:

You can always disavow the links if you don't like them the point of the tool is to tell Google "i don't trust this link and don't want to be associated with it!" so if your in doubt you can always disavow it and sleep easy. Just make sure you have looked into multi metrics and are sure its not doing you any good.

Hope that helps, Wish you the best of luck and welcome to Moz.

[HBFDigital]

Thanks everyone. There is a definite drop in organic traffic and our normal presence on page 1 is 7 or more pages in the hole now. Haven't had notification of a penalty, though it feels like it.

Cleaning up some technical seo problems at the moment with sitemap structure etc. I tend to agree with Andy... if it walks like a duck....

Open site explorer is where I will start. Thank you. I will try Majestic if i need to dig further.

Really appreciate the responses.