Clean up of Links, What to get rid of?

[BruceA]

We have been cleaning up our back office and preparing our .com domain to take all our future traffic and have got into a debate about how far to clean up the old past links.

We have not ever had a penalty on the site as far as we know, but did once get the site taken offline by Google as they thought it was a malware site back in March this year.  They put it straight back up and running in 5 hours, but was very strange as it is an amazon-webstore retail site.

We are not sure why Google thought (edit: typo) this, so just in-case we have been combing through the historical links and now started to disavow any links we cannot get removed manually.  So far just a couple of sites that have no relevance to our retail business.

However, the debate we have been having is around Directory listings: Should we get rid of these too?  Gut reaction is Yes, based on the need for quality relevant links for the end user, but then some are passing proper links to relevant sections of our site albeit in a directory format.  Dmoz comes to mind

Any thoughts?

Bruce.

[BruceA]

Good points.

Following on from recent developments from the Matts Cutts comments about Directories, we get loads of links which could be, might not be really from Directories.  As these are not top links we have removed some, which we can see are not related to our business at all and have removed these, but some are in that grey area, where the directory has good Trust and authority, but the links are somewhat generic.

We have been working on removing links for quite a few a month or so, and we have seen our Global rank drop like a stone, as unlinking is not a good sign from where-ever, so we know this will recover.

The balancing of this debate is how far you go to strip back to pure distilled links and allow a few diluted links.

[PrintPlace.com]

Since you have brought up the question I would say that as you are looking for what would be the best for your site always think about how this benefits your site visitors. The focus should always be on content. Is the backlink in question relevant at all to what you are doing as a business? If the answer is yes ask yourself if the site that you are linking to is of any value. How is the trust flow and page rank to that site. I hope this helps.

Malcom