Advise / Help on Bad Link Removals

[TheITOteam]

Hey everyone. 
Im new to the community and new to backlinks - hence the question to the community today.
I would like help understanding options and work load around back links and removing them.
I have a client with over 8000 back links as a few years ago he paid someone about £10 to boost his rankings by adding thousands of backlinks.
We fear this is having a bad effect on their site and rankings organically as 90% of these back links have a spam score of over 50% and also no follows.

My questions to the community (if you could be so kind to share) are:
1. Whats the best way to decide if a Backlink is worth keeping or removing
2. Is there a tool to decide this or assist with this somewhere on the internet?

Ive had advise stating if its not hurting the page we should keep it. However, again...
How do I know what damage each Backlink is causing to the domain?

I appriciate anyones time to offer some advice to a novice looking to clear these

[Dalerio-Consulting]

The quality of a backlink is based on several factors, with the main being:

• Domain Authority
• Page Authority
• Spam Score
• Relevancy

For the first 3 measurements you can get an estimate through the Moz Backlink Checker and it will help you filter damaging domains. Firstly you will need to focus more on the Spam Score, which is based on several factors calculated by Moz. Low Domain Authority and Page Authority aren't on itself a reason to disavow a backlink, but along with a high spam score or is posted on a page with irrelevant content then it can do more harm than good. My personal choice is disavowing most of the backlinks with a spam score of 50-70% and higher, and most of the backlinks with a low DA/PA and a spam score of over 20%.

Relevancy is the most difficult to maintain because it requires you to manually inspect every link and check their content. If your website is regarding construction and you have built backlinks on a gucci bags vendor it will do nothing to improve your rankings, or even harm them.

The geo-location of the site where the backlink is posted is very important for some businesses as well, given that they operate within a certain region. If you're operating within the US there would be no point in having backlinks in Italian or Chinese sites, and ranking on those regions, and from my experience it tends to lower rankings in the origin country. Backlinks on sites without a specific geo-location are fine though.

When selecting which backlinks to disavow you will need to be very careful not to disavow backlinks that are useful to your site and all the above factors need to be taken into consideration altogether.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

[TheITOteam]

Firstly, Thank you for such an insightful breakdown of how you would manage back links. Very useful.

I had heard that If we disavow a backlink that the backlink would still show in MOZ?
Is that true? I only know of Google Disavow, is there another way, platform or program you would advise to use? and how do I get it so that once Disavowed, the backlink no longer shows on our results?

[Dalerio-Consulting]

Thank you for the kind response. Always a pleasure helping other marketers and business owners.

As you disavow backlinks, google (or any other search engine where you disavow them) will not calculate the links when ranking your sites, but they will still be present where posted and will show up when researched on sites like Moz, SemRush, Ahrefs, etc.

The backlinks are not removed from Moz because the list of the disavowed links are stored on the database of the search engine to be used by them. For future disavowing you can check the newly-added links or filter the full site backlinks list with the disavowed links list.

You can find the disavow links tool in the search console/webmaster tools of the 2 main search engines: Google and Bing.

If you need help with the disavow process for your site, feel free to let us know.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com