Link Audit: How do I decide what is a good or bad link?

[jampaper]

I am conducting a link audit for one of my formerly high-ranking pages. But despite reading quite a bit on the issue, I am still quite confused as to how to decide whether to keep or remove a link.

Some links come from directories and social bookmarking sites. I know that generally speaking, you do not want to be on these types of sites, but what if their domain authorities, pageranks, and mozTrusts scores are good?

For example, here is one of my links for "envelopes": http://www.folkd.com/detail/www.jampaper.com%2FEnvelopes

The page itself has no MozRank, MozTrust, or links but the domain has an authority of 88, a MozRank of 6.41, a mozTrust of 6.31. Should I be looking on a page level or domain level basis? It also has over 5 million links, with over two million of those being external followed links. Is the high quantity of links a warning sign?

I also used a free online tool (thesitevalue.com) to determine how much traffic the domain gets. Apparently it receives over 350,000 unique visits daily, so it must be useful to people. This, combined with the fact that we've received 5 visits from the link over the last year (not a lot, but something), makes me believe that the link's intent wasn't purely to "trick" Google. Despite this, I still have a feeling the link could be considered low-quality based on the domain's appearance.

Similarly, some of our links are coming from domains named linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com. Is it safe to assume these are harmful links strictly because of their names?

Thank you!

[idealshape4life]

Hey Andrew,

I tried using www.thesitevalue.com and every url errors out at the last step, resulting in a site value of $8.95. I've noticed this on various sites, including sites I know have way more value than their domain alone

Have you experienced this? Do you use any other tools?

[jampaper]

Thanks for your feedback!

[jampaper]

awesome flow chart. Thanks a lot!

[JamesNorquay]

I think the main question with link removal is the following:

Are you trying to get out of a Manual or Algo penalty.

1. If the link is no follow - do not worry about it (many of these junk sites are no follow)

2. If the site is using a BRANDED anchor text or a URL anchor text on it I would not worry to a degree.

3. The main links you need to look at are GENERIC anchor text based links, the thing with these dodgy submission sites is if they have generic follow links to your site then yeah I would try to delete them and disavow.

It is really a case by case scenario, another think you can do is use the Majestic Bulk backlink checker on the URL level for any link removal you can check 150 urls at a time so it is good on the fly.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Andrew,

Let me start off with folkd.com. Its a very reputed social bookmarking website and there is no harm in having a link from there pointing to your website. Coming to how to evaluate a link, here you go:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2012/06/link-removal-flowchart/

Its very useful and extremely helpful to perform link evaluation.

In general, the intent behind the link matters and it can be determined by looking at the factors like, number of outbound links on the page (pointing to different not so useful or credible websites), the relevancy of the page to you, Moz stats of the domain etc..

Links from websites like linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com should be avoided like plague as their intent and sole purpose is to manipulate search results by providing a back link which would be absolutely of no use and can do more harm than good.

Hope those help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi