Which links should I remove?

[Coolpink]

What is your general approach when removing links for a new client? Just taken on some new work and found links that I wouldn't dream of building now (unrelated domain name, blogroll, single word, exact match anchor, dead sites).

However some of these are brand anchor links, and some of the pages have decent Page Rank (2/3/4). Obviously I don't want to remove links that might actually be helping the site in a weird way. It would be good to get an idea of other peoples approach to link removal - what goes, what stays etc?

[Coolpink]

Yeah I deliberately showed you that as a pretty awful example haha! This is what I'm dealing with. Unfortunately most of the links follow a very similar theme and that's why I'm worried I'm going to be removing a lot of links and alerting something at Google!!

Also, there's a few links in the same format as that example, but which have brand anchor texts and the page has Page Rank - I assume it should still go?

[zeepartner]

oh yes, that one definitely has to go! not only is the page full with spammy looking links, the content is also not original but copied or scraped...

[Coolpink]

Hi Philipp

Thanks for your prompt reply. The company did receive a unnatural links message back in July 2012 (along with thousands of other sites at the same time!) - however this was the 'targeted action against links' message rather than a site penalty.

I agree with your rule of thumb but it turns out that most of their links go against this principle - hence my caution! I'm tempted to remove all the links with PR N/A or Zero straight away - I'd be surprised if Google was assigning any value to these anyway.

Obviously I want to future-proof my strategy too - I don't want to have to clean up after getting hit by a penalty or an algorithm update!

Let me show you one of the pages as an example. There's a few links on this page so obviously I'm not revealing who my client is. http://scorec.org/the_plumbing_information_you_need_to_read/

[zeepartner]

That's a tough one, especially since I have no clue what your clients business is...

My rule of thumb: Any link and comment that is obviously made for seo and/or marketing one's own site must go (since it's also bad rep for a company). Everything that doesn't add any value to the content: go!

If the links are situated okay and not obviously spammy you could leave them unless you get a penalty. Same for exact match anchor: if you haven't been penalised there's probably no need to remove them now, but take care not to build more links with the same anchor text.