What to do about bad links from Social Media Bookmarking

[lemonz]

I'm still relatively new to SEO, so this site has been super helpful but I've hit a wall. My predecessor at my new(ish) job left me with a site that has been hit pretty hard by Penguin. I've been working at establishing all the bad links, and there are a lot.

One of the things that I have found is that at some point a Social Bookmarking scheme has been run and there are a huge number of links (all with spun content) on low quality sites. I don't think there is any value in them and at the moment they are ranking so badly that I really don't care if a couple of them do have value, I'd rather start again - changing the urls etc is not an option

I can't remove these links so about the best that I can do is to 'bury' them but of course this doesn't mean they disappear. Is this worth doing? Does anybody have any better suggestions?

[lemonz]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for this - that makes a lot of sense. Have been trying to contact the person who put them up but am yet to hear back (I'm forever hopeful though!).

Unfortunately the links are pointing at the homepage, I have already decided to write off a few pages which are suffering from a set of different bad links.

The new link building approach will definitely be good links - the website is for a business selling a quality product so there is no reason we can't build it up using normal marketing and avoid the spam!

Thanks for your help.

[wrttnwrd]

Hi lemonz -

1. Sounds like you tried this already, but: If there's any way at all to find out who was hired to build those links, or what service was used (if any), you can likely go to them and get most of the links removed, all at once.
2. What do those links point at? The home page, or something else? If they point at other pages on your site, and those pages don't have much other link juice, you might consider changing the pages' URLs and 404'ing the old ones. That would cause the social bookmarking links to fall out of Google's index (I think) and reduce the penalty.
3. Worst case, keep a detailed list of the links you've tried to remove, the reason it failed (no contact info, site owner refused to remove, etc.) and then send that log to Google with a re-inclusion request.

And, no matter which of these you do, try to 'bury' them with good links. That's always a good idea. Focus on the kinds of links, and link-generating content, that would make sense for a normal business doing normal marketing. That should help you improve your profile.

Hope this helps!