Back Link Question

[AlabuSkinCare]

Hi Folks,

Our domain (www.alabu.com) has been around since 2000. We've accumulated a lot of back links over the years, many of which I don't recognize and didn't ask for. I've been reading on here recently about "cleaning up" back links. I do see a lot of ours that just aren't relevant and I don't know why they decided to link to us. We haven't gotten a warning from google or anything like that, but I wonder, how do I know if we could benefit from cleaning up our back links? Is there a benefit to it even if google hasn't warned us?

Thanks!

Hal

[SEO5Team]

Have you suffered any penalty or loss in rankings/traffic. If you have then the answer is yes, use the disavow tool to report all the suspected bad links to Google. If you have not then a suggested  route would be to contact those directories and get your site removed.

[AlabuSkinCare]

We kind of let our website efforts fall off the plate for a while (like the past two years). In the mean time we dropped from #1 for some keywords all the way to the bottom of the second page. I kind of doubt it's because of back links and suspect it has more to do with Panda or Penguin, but how do I tell?

[SEO5Team]

no way to tell for sure except for looking at dates when the traffic dropped and when the Google updates took place. I've added the change history link for your reference.

Hope this helps

[AlabuSkinCare]

Ok that sounds good. Thanks a lot!

[KeriMorgret]

Just a quick note that Google has said that the disavow tool is a last resort, not a first option. It's only for those links where you have contacted the site and have not been able to get the link removed.

[KeriMorgret]

There is a good set of questions and information at http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/ about helping to determine if you have a penalty or were affected by a particular algorithm update.