An Easy Question - Backlinks

[MarkScully]

Hi guys,

I know this is an easy question and I'm already quite sure of the answer for it but it would be good to get some other views.

This website - http://www.collapso.net/ have 261,923 backlinks to our website according to Ahrefs.

They have 1000's of pages like this - http://www.collapso.net/countiesnew/Cork.html which link to our site.

43.95% of the backlinks to our site are from these guys but we've been fortunate enough to never receive any warnings via WMT or ever experienced drop offs in traffic.

My question is - Do we have this site remove all the links to our site or leave them alone?

Given there's such a large quantity of links, I'm not exactly sure what the impact would be on us.

My instinct says get rid of them. Although part of me questions what such a massive drop in our link profile would look like to Google.

[DougRoberts]

I really wouldn't worry about these links, I don't think these are going to harm your backlink profile.

Instead of spending time getting these removed I'd spend the time looking for good quality, relevant links. No point wasting your time on these or incurring the risk changing your backlink profile...

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[MarkScully]

Hi Doug,

Great points.

These links were never manually built by us. To-date, we haven't done any form of link building. Any links which point to our site have occurred naturally.

In the case of this website linking to us, they are scraping content  to inform users of their site about price drops in the property sector.

All of the links they have are pointing to individual property pages on our site.

To me it seems like they're just using the meta-descriptions as anchor text.

Mark

[DougRoberts]

I'm not sure how much link equity you're earning from those links (even given the vast number). With so many links on each page and the relatively low page authority of the linking page I'd be surprise that these links make much of a difference.

Questions to ask yourself though:

Is the site linking to you a legitimate/authentic site. Does it exist for a reason other than "to provide links"

Why do these links exist? Do they exist for a legitimate reason? (Without knowing your site it's hard to be specific).

How long have these links existed and what's the anchor text.

How is the linking site ranking for it's own target keywords - you can use this as an indicator for the authority/reputation google believe that site has. (The site you mention seems to be raking well for Irish property price tracker" etc.

My gut feeling (without too much digging) is not to worry about it.

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[SEOAndy]

If they haven't affected you this far, i'd say just leave them alone, they don't seem to be doing any harm.