What is the best way to analyze all of the outgoing links from a website to determine which links are not beneficial?

[kerrick-95531]

I've recently been tasked with the SEO on an old site that was ranking somewhere on page two for desirable keyword phrases. The site was taken completely offline for a few months and started ranking on page one for the same desirable keyword phrases. The site has a lot of link partners and I think that some of the links from the site are going to undesirable pages and I'm looking for the best way to get rid of the links that are hurting the sites rankings.

[SteveOllington]

When you say it has a lot of link partners, do you mean it has swapped links with a bunch of link farms?

Can you share the site address, I reckon it will be easy to spot which ones to keep and which to get rid of.... keep the ones to relevant content for a start

[Trupanion]

I would utilize Open Site Explorer and spend some time evaluating each link.  (unless you have 1,000's of them).

Make sure none of them are spammy sites with low MozTrust and keep only the ones that are relevant to your site.

And since you mentioned link partners, I would also evaluate all the incoming links.  Interesting how when the site was taken down for a couple of months it actually jumped up in rankings.  Sounds like this happened because some bad links where removed.

[kerrick-95531]

It's an adult site and I'd rather not share the link, actually. It's difficult to get links of any kind with that type of content, but there have been many reciprocal and three-way link exchanges in the past. There are literally dozens of links, but none of them seem to be from link farms. A couple from shady directories, but not farms.

[kerrick-95531]

Unless it really got an enormous boost just from having only incoming links for a couple months, the only other reason for the drop is if the site is being penalized in the rankings for linking to undesirable sites.

The only thing is... none of the links are obviously "more bad" than any of the others. They all seem pretty iffy, but the adult industry is mostly shady anyway, and it's just difficult to tell with some of these.

Also, this is more of a favor so I don't want to spend an enormous amount of time checking things.

[SteveOllington]

lol well that would be a niche where you'll get some link troubles. But yes you're right it's very likely that some of those outgoing links are causing the issue. Any site that is spammy or in a spammy neighbourhood needs to be removed. Do you really need to keep any of them? Reciprocal links really don't do a lot for you anyway.