Clean up bad links or start again?

[Karen_Dauncey]

I am looking to take on a new client but when I looked at their current backlinks they have 420 low quality spammy irrelevant backlinks, all with keyword anchor text and no branded links at all. The site is still ranking well at the moment but I don't expect this to be the case long-term. Would you try and remove the old links and then disavow any that you can't remove or would you start again on a new domain? Not sure which way to play it!

Thanks!

Karen

[Karen_Dauncey]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate your responses.

[GPainter]

Morning Karen,

As mentioned if its working why make even more work for your self and start again? It's always too easy to look at links accuse them of being spammy because they don't relate to your site. It doesn't take too long to remove links really and if you start to work on good SEO along side this your then making the site better from both ends so to speak.

A site will always have a variety of links its normal and what Google expects. I tend to leave some low end links on sites I work on because if you have all high quality sites pointed it can look just as bad if you have lots of low quality one's.

Remember starting a new domain can take months to go any where where as your domain is already ranking and already known, the general public won't know it has spammy links all they will know is its in the SERPS. If you wanted to you could do both start a new one whilst keeping this one afloat then redirect so you sort of get the best of both worlds though you would still have a drop in rankings.

Hopefully there are some insights and ideas above that you will find helpful, I wish you the best of luck in what you decide and as always I recommend you research into what you are about to jump into!

[Karen_Dauncey]

Thanks Christopher, all but one of the links are spam, and the one that isn't spam is an easy to get link anyway. All the links I have checked are on poor quality blogs, the blogs aren't in the clients niche, there is a lot of duplicate content and they are poorly written so that they don't actually make sense! Link building at it's worst!!!! Ahhh!

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Hi Karen, it depends.  Are all the links spammy or are there some good links as well?  Given that the site continues to rank well and without additional information, I'd be inclined to try and clean it up and create some new compelling content.  If it does get hit then you can reassess, but again, it depends in part on the value of the good links.

Best,
Christopher