Should I try to change these links or no?

[CaddisInteractive]

Hey guys, I need some advice on a link profile I'm currently working on. Our client sells a product in the hunting industry and has been around for over ten years. I just finished up classifying and looking at all of their links today and found that around half of them are sponsor links, links on "link pages," and a few directory links with almost all of them being followed.

Because we are the first company to do SEO for them, I know that these aren't maliciously solicited links, but I'm worried that they may be having a negative impact on the site. Most of the links are coming from other non-competing websites in the outdoor industry which typically tends to have very antiquated sites with very antiquated practices.

Essentially, I don't want to go out and try to nofollow or disavow all of these links that the website has had for a long time on other related websites if they're helping us, but I also don't want to be leaving anything up that could algorithmically be identified as spam. Below are some examples to show you what I'm referring to by the sponsor links and link resource pages. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Sponsored - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com/ or http://outdoorobsession.tv/ or http://thehollywoodhunter.com/

Link Resource Pages - http://bowhuntamerica.com/links or http://cornerarchery.com/CompanyLinks.html

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Do they have a manual penalty notification? If not, don't remove/disavow/nofollow links.

Were they hit by Penguin (check their analytics history)? Are their anchor texts predominantly keyword heavy? If not, don't remove/disavow/nofollow links.

[GPainter]

Hi Jesse,

I think they are fine, the reason why is as follows:

They are in the same related niche (I'm going off your examples) and they have been there for a while and if they've not hurt him yet and there are not thousands of them you may just cause more harm removing them and then have to explain why he has dropped in rankings.

What you could look into if it bothers you is remove them but attempt to replace the link value so there is no drop. However as i said earlier they are in the same niche and seems to be okay, you can always work on other links/areas so it diluted the above links in their profile

It's great to be proactive but don't be too scared of the Google and as long as the following is true you will be fine:

Make your site (and links) for the user

A user may go to - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com and then want to buy some hunting equipment and so the link is in fact normal and fine.

Hope it helps. Good luck!