What would you consider a "bad link"?

[vwnatalie]

So, our website has a pretty profound collection of inbound links- which no one has really been taking care of the past 10 years. lol. Our users love us and they love to talk about us every chance they get. Which is great, except that I am new to the company and I am trying to sort through our links. Lots of them come from foreign forums and some are even in "hacking" forums, because some of our "not so great" users abuse our service. So, how am I am to tell what links and sites are good vs. bad? I have found some that are on old industry related link sites, I should definitely try to get rid of those right? Thanks in advance for the help and sorry if I am being unclear.

[MarieHaynes]

Did you, (or an SEO on your behalf) actually build any of these links?  Or did they come to you naturally?  If you didn't build them, don't worry about them.

I have a site for which I have done no link building.  It is a content site that only attracts natural links.  Even this site has some spammy links, but I'm not worried one bit about removing them.

You don't need to remove links unless you have been building them yourself.  Now some would argue that you may want to remove links in the case of negative SEO, but that is really rare.

[vwnatalie]

Thanks for that! These are all natural links, except for one case. When the site was first established, they had users that were interested use a referral program. If the user posted our image with a link to our site, they could earn referral points. Are these bad? I was thinking yes. One site alone is linking up to 14k times.

[BeardoCo]

I think any natural link is fine as long as its not a gambling, pharmaceutics or porn website.  I would caution to make sure that there isn't any negative SEO going on, but it sounds like you have a self sustaining link building campaign without having to do anything.

[MarieHaynes]

I'm more concerned about the number of domains rather than the number of links.  Google's usually pretty good at figuring out that those 14000 links are actually just one domain.

If you've got a pattern of obviously manipulative linking then you may want to consider removing them.  But you could do yourself more harm than good in doing so though.  If the vast majority of your link profile is natural I'd ignore those self made links.  The only exception would be, perhaps, if these links all contained anchor text for which you were trying to rank.  Then there's a chance that a future Penguin refresh could get ahold of that.  It's a tough call.