Good or Bad Backlinks

[Palmbourne]

Hi All

We are trying to go through all of our backlinks to see which links are good and which are bad. We are

using two paid for tools to find our backlinks and sort them out, either good or bad. I have found that

both tools have returned links as being good even though

the links are not indexed by Google and have no page rank. Also we have found that both tools returns

some links as good even though the links are pointing to a 404 page.

Any advice on how to proceed would be appreciated.

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

Do not rely only on tools, use your common sense as well. For example, moz's new spam rating - a blog comment link coming from a page with gibberish content, tons of ads and 2500 spammy unmoderated comments would seem like spam to me, but moz's spam rating is only 2.

By the way, which tools are you using?

[Palmbourne]

This post is deleted!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi John

A portion of this question has been asked before in the forum. You can access that question and those answers here.

Here are a couple great resources from Search Engine Journal on bad backlinks:
How To Spot Bad Links & Deciding Whether To Take Action
A How to Guide on Identifying Bad Links and Pruning Them Using Google’s Disavow Tool

To quote an answer from a previous question in the same vein here on Moz: "In the end it really boils down to having to look at the links manually and answer a couple of simple subjective questions: "Does the link look natural and genuine?" and "Does the link provide any benefit to real people?". If a link fails these questions, then there is no real reason for it to exist and it may be seen as suspect."

Can't do much better than that - like Rick says - use your common sense! Good luck!

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

I haven't used monitorbacklinks but I have used cognitiveseo and I could say it's not very bad and not very good. If you can take a sample of 1000 links and then randomly check 10-20 of them manually, using your common sense, you'll see that CS is right about some and wrong about some.

For me, the only tool I can rely on is linkresearchtools (link detox) - which is right about links in about 80-90% of the cases. It's a bit expensive tho but I think they offer some sort of free trial.

[MarieHaynes]

I am not a fan at all at using automated link auditing software.  I review a lot of disavow files for sites that have not been able to pass reconsideration requests and in many cases they have relied on an automated tool.  This always results in good links getting flagged as bad and many bad links being missed.

In one case some fantastic links from the BBC and the Guardian were flagged for disavow.

Last summer I spent several months trying to write an algorithm to help me automate some of my link auditing process.  In some cases I got up to 95% accuracy, but this means that in a site with links from 1000 domains, I'd be wrong on 50 of them which just won't cut it when it comes to escaping either Penguin or a manual penalty.  I ended up scrapping several months' worth of work.  I still use my tool in house to help me organize my links and compare them against my disavow blacklist/whitelist but I don't rely on it for making decisions.

I think that some of the tools can be good when it comes to helping you organize your links into a manageable format so that you can manually review them.  But, nothing takes the place of manually reviewing links.

[Palmbourne]

Thank you for your reply, I will follow your advice and go over all of my links again.

John