How do you handle a site with inherited negative links, but no penalty?

[zakkyg]

I'm trying to rank a new client for various key phrases that contain "it support."

The problem is that about 100 of their 180 total referring domains have links that include "it support" (usually as partial match, or if exact then for uninteresting terms with low traffic), mostly on quite low quality directories.

So, no penalty, and not much exact match I'm worried about, but I'm concerned that there's too high a percentage overall of partial match or simpy "it support"-based links for me to continue building keyword-optimized links to try and rank for the much harder terms we need to rank for...

Despite the large number of low quality directories, a disavowal does not seem like a good idea since there is no penalty, but how does one avoid being handicapped by such bad links that came before one's time?

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi There,

First of all have you reviewed all the links on link Quality metrics and analyzed it well?

Use this URL to measure the RIGHT link quality first:
https://moz.com/blog/7-link-seo

Once you are convinced these are not so high-quality links which don't provide you right traffic and audience, then you should not take it lightly. If your website is not impacted till now, it doesn't mean that it won't be impacted in future, google and other search engines are getting smarter by the day and don't ever be complacent or over-smart with search engines.

Disavow low-quality links and move on to build a higher quality link profile.

I hope this helps, feel free to respond and ask further questions.

Best Regards,

Vijay

[zakkyg]

Thanks for the advice, but I don't think disavowing links without a penalty in place sounds like a good practice. Would love to hear from some others on this subject?

[Xiano]

I agree with Vijay.  If you know they are low-quality links you should act to have them removed.

We have a client with the exact same issue.  They had paid an SEO in the past to do some work and it would appear that the majority of that work was building incredibly poor quality links, including, but not limited to, creating entire sites with links solely back to the client's site.

We've spent the last few weeks clearing up the bad links, and there is still more to be done. We did pre-warn the client that this work was going to be carried out and explained that there was a potential of a drop in rankings due to it.  Fortunately in this case, due to the other work being carried out, we didn't see an overall drop.

I would hate to be having a conversation with a client in a few months once they've been hit with a penalty saying "Yes, we knew there was a problem, but we ignored it because it wasn't causing a direct issue at the time"

[TheZenAgency]

If the links are low quality disavow them, better to be proactive rather than wait for a penalty then having to go through the process anyway.