How do I go about removing low authority, crappy, backlinks?

[JustinWalmsley]

How do I go about getting rubbish backlinks on a clients websites removed? The links were created by a previous companies link building campaign, and I believe this (along with a few other things) could be the reason for their poor SERP's as they are an established website.

Can I alert Google and get them to discredit the links, or do I manually have to try to make contact with the owners/webmasters of the websites to get the links removed?

All help appreciated!

Thanks

[McTaggart]

Last time this happened, I identified the SEO agency, got some advice from a specialist lawyer, and then issued a take-down request in the strongest terms (though with bad backlinks being replaced with good backlinks). It worked.

[ontarget-media]

Justin,

I'd also like to suggest that instead of trying to get the low quality links removed, it will be a better option to try and obtain higher quality links.

Manoj

[DougRoberts]

Hi Justin, I take it that you've not had any other signs that you've been penalised. You've not received any warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools or had the clients pages vanish from the search results completely? They still have pages in the index?

You mention that you're trying to recover from a previous companies link-building activity. How much information do you have to work with?

Do you have any historic ranking reports? Do you know how the rankings have changed and when? Can you find out what the position was before they started their link building and how it's changed over time?

Can you establish how badly your client has been affected? Do you have access to the site's analytics? Can you see/quantify any sudden loss of search traffic etc?

Personally I'd start by taking a good look at the SERPS for the chosen keywords and seeing how strongly your clients pages are likely going to compete.

In your view, with a cynical SEO eye, do the pages deserve to rank higher than the competition?

How would your client react if you put their page and a competitors ranking page side by site and asked them to say honestly which one was best? (I don't recommend that you do this unless you know how they'll respond!!)

[DougRoberts]

Hi Caroline. My guess would be that they're not being directly penalised, but are suffering because their inbound links are coming from what Google sees as low ranking, low-quality, low value-add sites such as, but not always, content farms etc.

If you suspect this to be the case it's really important to look beyond the headline "linking root domains" number and look at the domain/page authority of those linking domains.

If you were trying to differentiate good content from bad - would you look at the number of votes, or the number of votes from respected sources? (Espectially when you know that people are trying to game the system by building lots of "easy" low quality links.)

This is of course just my opinion. I'd love to know if there any evidence for actually "link penalties".

[JustinWalmsley]

@doug

Thanks for the quick answer, I think that @caroline's point/question is also of main concern. I am happy to leave the links as long as I can dilute their (potentially negative) effects by gaining quality, authority links, but I would expect from the first Panda update, that backlinks from link farms/directories would carry no authority and therefore would have little to no effect on the website that they were linking to.

[TalarMade]

Doug could I ask you a question?

I've noticed that in the last few months people have attributed their decrease in the rankings to 'being penalised for bad links'.

It is the case that they were previously gaining benefits from those links and that with the recent changes these links go back to 0 influence, reducing their rankings to what they previously were, as opposed to the links having a negative impact on their sites?

[DougRoberts]

You won't get Google to do anything about them, but Google have said that "crappy backlinks" won't hurt you, they just won't be worth much anything.

(Backlinks obtained in an underhand unethical manner might though...)

If you really want to get the links removed you'd need to contact the individual webmasters. This is likely to take lots of time/effort that you're almost certainly better off spending doing some high-quality link building or content creation.