External Backlinks - Should I remove/disavow external blog posts done by SEO company?

[ajgrossman]

Last year my company hired an SEO company to build backlinks for targeted achor text keywords.  It turns out that they wrote average to below average blog posts that had content related to my business, but that were placed on odd websites, not related to my business.  They did this for about one year before I fired them.

Should I try to get each of those blog posts removed and then disavow them?  If the external links back to my site are nofollow then it is my understanding that I don't really need to worry about them...is that accurate?

Is it too risky to keep any external backlinked content alive when it is on a site that is unrelated to my business?

[DennisSeymour]

Hi AJ,

I would compile a list of the stuff they made

I would then take a look at the sites. Odds are, some are actually good sites with good traffic.

You should be able to get a few good ones at least.  You can opt to change the content. Keep those and remove the links on the rest.

IF they had unlinked brand mentions, just remove those mentions as well. No need to take down the whole thing

If you want, you can actually replace the links and point it to one of your employees blogs, a social property or somethin' that isn't really ranking or has nothing to lose - Just being honest here because simply repurposing it instead of scrapping a whole year's worth of your "investment" is always better in my eyes.

[MoosaHemani]

Low quality content on irrelevant sites, I guess this is enough information to make a decision about removing those posts (or atleast links from the posts).

The process will be same, contact the bloggers and see if they are willing to remove the post (or atleast a link from the post) incase yes awesome and in the case of NO, just include the link in the disavow file and submit it to Google Webmaster Tool.

Hope this helps!

[Chris661]

You might contact the firm that placed the links and see if they can remove them. If they were done in profiles or by creating accounts with passwords, hopefully they can remove them. It can be very difficult to get links removed and time consuming if you must do it by contacting the webmasters. And most of them will not respond. But Google does state they want you to attempt to clean up the links. Have you checked GWMT for warnings? Even without warnings you can be penalized by algorithms. A lot of info on that here on Moz worth reading.

I am sure you will get great advice here, but those links are not doing you any good and should be removed and disavowed. You are correct that the nofollows won't hurt, but I would want all the spammy links gone if it were my site. It is not so much that links on sites unrelated to your business are necessarily bad, but those that are clearly manipulative (like anchor text) are pretty obvious to Google. Nuke 'em all.