Identifying Bad Domains

[andrewlegal]

In the past week my website has not been doing well.

How can I look at a list of domains linking to my website to identify which ones are harmful and need to be removed. Is there a checklist of criteria that a linking doamin to meet for me to remove it?

Thank you for your help.

[MarieHaynes]

You've gotten some excellent advice already.  I'll add a few of my thoughts.

First of all, have you been doing link building?  If not, then this may not be the right road to go down.  If you've noticed a drop just recently, it may be that the Panda algorithm is affecting your site and Panda really isn't about link quality.  There was a big Panda update on May 20 although many sites started seeing changes a couple of days before that.

If you have been doing link building and you want to clean up your links then the goal is to find ones that were self made with the intention of gaming Google and then remove or disavow those. William's list is a good place to start.

[Kingof5]

Even with a tool like Link Detox (which I use and think is great), you'll still need to manually review every site as there will for sure be false positives. You'd probably be better off hiring someone to do this for you than trying it yourself.

[andrewlegal]

Thank you for all your responses.

[MoosaHemani]

You are actually talking about link audits and identifying the bad links from the system. When it comes to link audit there are multiple tools available for it. If you are using Moz.com (Open Site Explorer) will give you the detailed insight of the links that are pointing back to your site. You can try other tools like Majestic SEO and Ahrefs.com for this. It is ideal to use the data of multiple tools like a data combination of GT, Moz.com, Ahrefs.com and Majestic SEO will be mind blowing.

Above tools will only give you the link profile but how to find the bad links out of it is another job. There are two ways here:

-          Do it Manually

If you are going to do it manually then you need to set the parameters like which link is bad and which link in the system is worth including in the good list. Try to remove all the bad links and if they does not remove include them in the disavow file and submit it to Google.

-          The Tool way!

There are tools like Link Detox and Link Risk that can do this job using their signals to identify a bad link. This is a little costly ideas as these tools are a little on the high end.

Although there are tools available but it is always a better idea to go manually on this as tools can guess wrong so you always have to check the things manually even after get passed by the system.

Hope this helps!

[WilliamKammer]

There are tools out there you can pay for to do this work for, things like linkdetox.com can be helpful to identify the bad links. Something like Rmoov is great to then begin to removal process.

If doing it on your own, you'll need to check out each questionable domain manually. You can rule out big domains that you know are not spammy, and focus on the ones you have no idea about. When looking at a domain, ask yourself the following:

• Is this site indexed in Google?

• Could I easily create a followed link from this domain to mine? OR pay for one?

• Does this site seem to be scraping information of mine from other sources?

• Is this site in English (or whichever language your site is in)?

• Is it a crappy directory site? Article submission site? Other easily exploitable kind of site?

These are the sorts of things to look out for. Google doesn't want to count links for you if you made them for SEO purposes, or paid someone else to. If you look at a site, and it appears that their business model is building links, or they are spammy in anyway, you know it's a red flag.

Also, I'm learning more and more that when you're on the fence about a domain, disavow it.

[FCBM]

Do a site:www.examplesite.com search in Google. This will show if Google has penalized them. Also you can run them all through SEMrush and see if they have been hit by Google, you can Identify that by their drop in organic traffic. That's two of many way to do the research.