Identifying bad backlinks

[Gherson]

We were recently approached by a SEO agency saying that we had a bunch of very toxic links. They wanted to do the work for us but we've decided to keep costs down and keep it in-house.

I've downloaded a list of the links to our site from Google Webmaster Tools and am now manually going through each link to find the links we want removed/disavowed.

What is the best way to judge the links? Please note: I have limited resources.

I'm using a combination of my gut and SEO Moz's Domain Authority.

If the site or directory is irrelevant and has a low Domain Authority I put the link in the remove pile.

If I come across a directory that doesn't seem too bad and it has a reasonable Domain Authority I leave the link.

Am I doing enough?

[benjaminmarcinc]

Im doing the same thing right now for my company and I'm having the same trouble, i go to the site that my link is on and if the site looks spammy or has a lot of advertisements on it, i ask for removal or disavow. I hope this helps.

[LesleyPaone]

There are two main places that I know that people go to to find bad backlinks, http://www.linkdetox.com/  and http://www.removeem.com/

Remove'em has a Moz perk where you can get 25% off the self serve plan too.

[irvingw]

I use linkresearchtools.com but keep in mind that all links need to be manually vetted, and that by disavowing too many links you can actually harm your sites rankings because you are cutting off page juice. Do your best to balance between disavowing really bad links with low or no PR and keeping ones that might be helping you, especially if your site is not actively building new good links. Also, never let a person or company upload a disavow file without giving it a second look.

[Gherson]

Thanks Irving, Prestashop and Benjaminmarcininc.

So basically, I'm on the right track by manual vetting but should be careful about culling too many questionable links.

To manage the link removal process I'm considering using Rmoov. Anyone had any experience with that product?

[lbi-tr]

This is one of those constantly recurring questions and you will find lots of posts which cover the subject on loads of sites as well as here on Moz (eg, http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-detect-a-bad-link-and-remove or http://moz.com/community/q/how-can-i-find-this-bad-link).

There are several tools out there that can help, such as LinkResearchTools Detox mentioned by Prestashop, but while they are useful in crunching large amounts of links down to manageable levels they can also often give you false positives, and in the end you don't want to be disavowing too many non-harmful links either.

You can enter a sites domain name into Google to see if it appears and then if it doesn't it means it is likely to have been penalised, check to see if the site is part of a network, and you at the sites PR, Domain Authority or similar metrics but these often catch new domains which can be genuine but have simply not had a chance to establish themselves.

In the end it really boils down to having to look at the links manually and answer a couple of simple subjective questions: "Does the link look natural and genuine?" and "Does the link provide any benefit to real people?". If a link fails these questions, then there is no real reason for it to exist and it may be seen as suspect.