Link profile clean up

[drimlike]

Hello everyone,

we are actively working on cleaning the backlink profile of some of our sites. But I am confused on what needs to be done. Now it's possible to find some toxic or deadly domain where our site has been linked from without our approval, but if we remove all those sites, and may be all the site that have a poor domain authority and/or no PR rank (< 1), our profile will look too clean don't you think? . My questions are :

• If we over clean our profile are we not manipulating our links, so Google will not like it?

• Is a natural profile will not be a mix of all those domains (poor and good quality)?

We are trying to see what to keep or try to get deleted/disavow, so we could try to claim some of our lost ranking back

Thanks for your help on this,

Cheers,

Mounir

[Carson-Ward]

Good questions; do you think you're under penalty now? If not, just work on cleaning up the future of your "link building" efforts rather than trying to go in reverse and fix things. A few answers to your questions:

• No, Google will not penalize you for having a profile that is "too clean."
• Google doesn't care if you "manipulate" your link profile. They care if you've built links to manipulate their ranking system. Anchor text is one big sign that you're attempting to increase your rankings for certain terms.
• Google is pretty good at targeting links you've built to increase rankings. The links that will hurt you are those you've built - not the junky links that everyone acquires over time. The only exception might be a spam attack from a competitor, but that's rare and another issue altogether.

If you've built highly-targeted links, take those down. Don't waste your time taking down low-quality links that other people build to you. If you think links you haven't built are harming you, double-check WMT for a penalty and make sure there's no overly-targeted anchor text  stemming from your own efforts.

[DarinPirkey]

"Manipulation" to me suggests that you are wondering if you'll receive some sort of penalty for the search engines only keeping good links and removing bad links.  A basic answer is "no" but I would recommend a strategy that would protect you in the event that you somehow got a penalty.

If you are e-mailing webmasters and the like, I would set up a separate gmail account and only use this account for your link removal process.  In the event you receive a manual penalty from Google, you can share the details of this account with them to let them know your process.  You'll have e-mails that prove your efforts and if you use Google spreadsheets to notate your efforts also, you'll do yourself a huge favor when trying to explain your reasoning for removing all the links.  In the spreadsheet, you could have all the links you are trying to remove in one column, the contact dates in successive columns and a column at the end that notate removal date of the link from the webmaster.  If you keep this all in the same Gmail account, you'll be able to share the account details with Google in the event of a manual penalty.

That being said, I don't think you'll have a manual penalty issue.  The issue I could see is a algorithmic penalty that would come about via the over optimization of the left over links.  For the links you are keeping and the links you build going forward, I would recommend using a good mix of anchor text and start to focus more on your brand name.  You can use opensiteexplorer.org to download your anchor text and use a pivot table to see the anchor text diversity.  I'm sure there are tools out there that will automatically give it to you but I pretty much only use OSE.

I hope this helps

[drimlike]

@vzPro

Thanks for the feedback, but after anlysis it seems that we have a lot of "unwanted" links, even one from a porn site

I feel that it should be a mix of both world, cleaning + going after good quality links. But I am just not sure how google sees that , as I said if we managed to get rid of all bad links and keep only the good ones is it not some kind of manipulation ?

Thanks again for your feedback though

Cheers,

Mounir

[DarinPirkey]

Personal Opinion --> Unless you've been it by Google's algorithms, your time is much much much much better served trying to gain quality, authority, relevant links then "cleaning up" old ones.

Unless your links are all exact match anchor text, I wouldn't worry about them.  If they are, you could help yourself by asking the sites to link to you differently with a diverse range of anchor text.

All in all, cleaning up takes just as much time as getting new, high quality, highly relevant links.  It's all about time management.