Need advise/strategy for cleaning up backlinks to my site

[rubennunez]

I recently redesigned my website (studio35design.com), and with that, I'm finally paying attention to SEO. I used a few different tools to find the amount of backlinking domains I've built up through the 7 or so years.

The numbers are the following:

52 Total Backlinking Domains (800+ links):
• 17 of those are from blog commenting - they are pretty much all NF
• 20 of those are from sitewide footer credits on websites I've built. They are all old, as I stopped adding sitewide links to my client sites over a year ago. 
• 7 of those are from spam. My site was hacked last year which contributed to alot of it. I've since then completely scrapped my old site and built this one on webflow (Not self-hosted like my old WP site).
• The other 10 or so are from forums, and the odd photo credit.

As you can tell, almost none of these backlinks links are really any good. I'm surprised that my DA is 27 really.

So moving forward, I need to know the best strategy dealing with these "bad" links.

For the spam, I'm going to disavow in google webmasters. As for the rest, here are my questions...

QUESTION 1:
As for the sitewide links, would the best thing be to remove the link altogether from the footer of each one of those sites? Some I can't because they are really old, and I don't have access to them (I'll probably disavow), but the rest I can still go in and update.

QUESTION 2: 
Will removing a ton of links at once hurt my DA and my google ranking? I can probably eliminate 500-600 links within a few days just by removing the sitewide links. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? A few months?

QUESTIONS 3:
Should I disavow blog commenting links even though they are NF? Does it matter at all?

QUESTION 4:
I noticed 5 or so of the domains I have links one aren't working domains anymore. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[rubennunez]

Thanks man!

[Deacyde]

Well, the thing is, disavowing a backlink only does one thing, it makes the backlink a nofollow in Google's eyes. And this process will take anywhere from about a week to 3 months or more, that's basically sticking to Googles MO and the numbers are from a few articles from Search engine journal and elsewhere.

As far as MOZ / AHREFS they will differ, moz most likely won't have all your backlinks in the 1st place, so you won't be able to even know due to how they index. And Ahrefs will have about 80% or so of your links maybe more or less, so it too isn't the best, but it's a good idea and they even have a rank based on your backlink profile and how healthy it is, the lower the better.

If you're referring to broken or removed backlinks that happen naturally, that's just a matter of when they're crawled. Don't expect any haste unless you're a fortune 2,000 company, unfortunately.

Just keep an eye on your keyword rankings, as when you improve your backlink profile, your rankings will improve depending the amount of link juice you regained or lost, it's like ratios, too many bad backlinks does seem to affect the backlink's health and thus pruning can be beneficial..

[rubennunez]

Great article Kevin. Thanks!

[rubennunez]

Really good strategy Deacyde! Thank you so much for your detailed respond. Once more question.. any idea how long it takes for Google /OSE / aHrefs to remove dead links/listings?

[Deacyde]

I've been disavowing urls for my current client for the past 4 months.

I 1st went through like you, but from various sources to get a broad overall picture.

Then I went through EACH AND EVERY SINGLE ONE, create a spreadsheet and add a comment to each listing, good, spam, needs more looking! This takes a few days if not more. But is very important, because your eyes are much better at seeing the spam ( just poor UI, many times if they use pagerank still its no good, just check for if this site would really help users )

Once you've gone through and done the above, it's best to start small, group or order your results from the spam section into worst offenders to least spammy, start disavowing about 25 to 50 link chunks, don't forget if you get a lot of backlinks from a spam domain, to disavow the backlinks shown and the domain like this ( domain:site.com )

You'll want to disavow in chunks so you know whats helping and what is hurting, so if you disavow a chunk and your site starts hurting, you can quickly see what it is and remove them from the disavow file and re-upload it.

I've so far removed most directories, unless I see something that is different or that can help users, mainly you want to make sure humans are editing link submissions and that there aren't any pay to rank schemes on it.

Remove all blog / article comments, they aren't good for you, but if you want to keep some, remove all keyword rich anchor text links, this goes for EVERY follow backlink you have that is a keyword rich anchor text. Google hates these, and will cause you problems later on if you don't at least categorize them and key track.

By doing the above, I've seen my client's backlink rank on ahrefs.com climb from 15,000,000 to now 9,400,000, that's in the last 4 months. Which I'm pretty happy about, just the bigger kicker is trying to get good quality backlinks, in my niche, people don't really operate like most other niches, this niche isn't just boring, it's counter-intuitive to what most SEO backlink processes are.

I hope this has helped, and please, ASK QUESTIONS! only way to learn!

[KevnJr]

Ruben,

This article helped me, I disavowed for 6 months and now quarterly. This may help you too: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

KJr