Ditching of spammy links - will it be of benefit?

[themegroup]

Hi there. We have recently taken over the SEO for a five-star hotel who rank very well already for a lot of their main terms, largely down to the fact they have decent off-site strength (as yet very little on-page optimisation has been done, so they aren't appearing for some quite key terms). This off-page strength includes around 2000 links, giving the home page an authority of 63 in the OSE tool. However, upon looking at the links to check they were pointing to the most relevant page etc, I notice they have A LOT of spammy links, pointing to their site with anchor text like 'cheap cialis' or 'buy valium'.

Clearly these aren't the kinds of links that should be pointing to a five-star hotel, but should I expect to see much of a drop by attempting to remove these links? We obviously want to clean their link portfolio up, but I'm not sure they would be too happy if all their top rankings disappeared - even if only temporarily, and even if done with the best intentions.

I ask as none of the other sites we handle SEO for have had such a proliferation of these links, so I've not seen the ramifications in full.

Any help would be much appreciated, along with advice on the best way to remove these links.

[Bevelwise]

Really the only way to get the links fixed is to contact the webmasters of the websites and have them removed.  Either that or remove the destination pages url, move the content and move let the destination 404.  That would only be if the links pointed to a sub page instead of the home page, because obviously no one wants their home page to 404.

The next thing to focus on in my opinion is how bad these links are hurting you.  There are 2 ways I look at bad/useless links.  Search engines can just say a certain website is pretty much crap and that all links don't pass any value and are basically null to a link profile.  Then there is the really bad stuff that actually can affect you negatively.  In my opinion, I believe most links that are bad end up just being null or useless to your link profile.

Since you're concerned about the bad links and you want to attempt to remove them, first, I would put your effort into a "white-hat" link building strategy and then once you've built up more links you could go through and start to try and correct old spammy links.  That way you wouldn't have really lost any rankings for losing a handful or more of links if your profile, since you're replacing them with new links.

[themegroup]

Thanks for your response. We are obviously about to start on the white hat link building side of things - that was how I stumbled upon all the spammy links. According to OSE, they are actually passing quite a lot of benefit, but I would think this is only for a limited period of time.

Unfortunately they do seem to point to the homepage in about 99% of cases, so the 404 is not an option. Also, I can't really see what these other sites are getting out of the set up - they are linking to us with terms implying we sell viagra, vicodin etc, when we're a five star hotel. Seems very odd?

[themegroup]

Another thing that has occurred to me with this - it's not so much whether the links are passing value / negative value, but more that the anchor text is telling the search engines that our site may be a place to buy viagra, vicodin etc - and surely that's never a good thing?