Link Profile - What is Good or Bad?

[CalicoKitty2000]

How can I tell (using Moz tools) which links are okay or not?  Looking at them, some are clearly just for rank, but are they worth my effort in removing them?  And, if I remove a bunch of links suddenly, will Google penalize me?  And how do I know if my link profile is to blame?

My site was ranking pretty well in June and has steadily fallen around 4-5 spots across all of my keywords. Some of my competitors without as good of DA, PA and links are outranking me.

[Mizuni]

Thank you for sharing your resources with the community!

[Patrick_G]

Never used the siteexplorer tool, but it probably provides very similar data. The Moz toolbar has worked fine for me.

[CalicoKitty2000]

This is very helpful! Thank you!

Also, I didn't know about the Moz tool bar, so I need to get that too!  I've been using the siteexplorer tool.

[Patrick_G]

I took a look at the links you posted. I'm not sure of what your business is, so I can't comment on relevance.

Some of these links hopefully popped up naturally, though if you had a previous SEO firm doing work, some of them might have come via that channel.

http://www.mobileresources.net/mobi/Night_Shark_Fishing_Florida/ is definitely a directory.

I used the Moz bar to show me it has a Page Authority of 1, and a domain authority of 25, so I would email the webmaster and ask them to "nofollow" the link or remove it, if not relevant to your business. Because of the low ranking, if it were my website, I wouldn't worry about it hurting my rankings by having it removed/nofollow.

On http://drama.academia.edu/LelaRanson I would leave this one. It has high DA value of 85 and at least on the surface looks like good content.

http://jeremyrymill.tumblr.com/post/93825362281/the-canaveral-circus

I personally wouldn't worry about stuff on Tumblr, as many social networks automatically nofollow all tags. Here you can see some of the links on the page are nofollow.

The post <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">rel</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="nofollow" href="</a>http://ift.tt/1v4ezED">The Canaveral Circus appeared first on <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">rel</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="nofollow" href="</a>http://ift.tt/1oFpDCf">Florida Fishing Stories.

Since you don't have a penalty, I honestly wouldn't spend lots of time getting rid of bad links as long as you believe no one on your end sought them out to begin with, like a former SEO. Focus more on continuing to build relevant links and content locally people want to link to. Easier said than done I know. But theoretically if Google hasn't taken a manual action of any sort out on your website, your issue lies with competitors simply optimizing more effectively, not "bad links."

[CalicoKitty2000]

There are so many links that I never requested.  They are weird search type directory websites, I never requested. Here is an example.

http://www.mobileresources.net/mobi/Night_Shark_Fishing_Florida/

There are also some that I'm pretty sure my previous SEO put up like this one:

http://drama.academia.edu/LelaRanson

And this looks like scraped or reblogged content... how in the world do I control this? Or do I want it?

http://jeremyrymill.tumblr.com/post/93825362281/the-canaveral-circus

[CalicoKitty2000]

Very thoughtful response, thank you  I will dig through all of this!

[Patrick_G]

Hello CalicoKitty,

I've been dealing with something somewhat similar for my website (slight drop in rankings, but in my case it includes a targeted penalty, not sitewide thank goodness!) If I were you I'd definitely look at your backlinks. I've disavowed and asked for a bunch of mine removed.

Since you don't have a penalty but are losing some rankings, here are some references that have helped me decide which links are worth keeping (along with everything else that goes along with trying to get rid of a penalty).

The quick and dirty rule of thumb I use (in addition to using the Moz Bar to also gauge the value of a link) is do I think this website is genuinely built for real people who might find what I'm talking about or selling useful. If it's on the fence, I generally leave it (especially since you don't have a current penalty) but if you know in your gut it doesn't seem helpful at all, and is built more for the search engines and looks like a junk page, then you're probably looking at a bad link.Identifying Link Penalties, 2012: http://moz.com/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012He does a nice job of comparing a good link profile with one that has a lot of bad links. (Essentially the same anchor text.)You can find a lot of good articles on the subject by Mozer Marie Hayne. She also wrote an excellent book on the topic available here. http://www.unnaturallinksrecovery.com. It walks you through every kind of link you might run across. The ebook is about $100 though, so I personally wouldn't buy it if I don't have a penalty on my website. That said, I bought it and I'm not sure how I would have ever worked through my penalty without her step-by-step assistance in the book.http://moz.com/community/users/308135In depth look at quality guidelines.http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelinesMy answered question on which links to remove, which Marie weighed in on:http://moz.com/community/q/manual-action-when-requesting-links-be-removed-how-important-to-google-is-the-address-you-re-sending-the-requests-from#reply_256531How to conduct a link audit:http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2207168/How-to-Conduct-a-Link-Audithttp://searchenginewatch.com/article/2330944/7-Things-You-May-Not-Know-About-Googles-Disavow-Tool - Mariehttp://moz.com/community/q/is-this-negative-seo-should-i-disavow-these-links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7WK3s693oI&list=UU3jmlL2rHbipq_2tDd5zDRA

[Justian]

Your metrics looks great! - and it seems to me like that's not the problem.

Its hard to say what the reason might be for the drop in rankings without future knowledge about the problem.

What about Google business page? Does your competitors have one? and are the located in more then one place? seems wierd that your local results are going up and the rest of them are dropping in pos. - I would definitely look into that as well.

When you say that some of your links looks like they are "clearly just for ranking" that sets of an alarm imo. If I was you I would take a closer look at your link profile and really take into consideration what might help the site in the future and what might harm the site.

If you have great content and you work on the trust - I am sure you will be reward and be back on the top in no time.

[CalicoKitty2000]

To be honest, I have only concentrated on my on-page optimization since about this time last year.  Working on creating content that would be naturally shared. We post to FB, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and a blog. I've worked on building our FB following and G+.  We get a lot of +1s now.  The only thing I have NOT done lately is anything with links. It seems I was hit by the latest Google update because that is when the majority of drop happened.  It happened between 10/3 and 10/28.  I lost 30 positions across my tracked keywords. Since then I have lost 2 more positions, but not gained any. Any ideas what might have happened in that update?

My site has way more content than my competitors... not in a spammy way, but in a useful way. I look at my competitors pages by viewing the source and they don't even look like they have done any on-site optimization.  Their sites haven't changed much in the last few years. I'm not sure if they pay for SEO or not.

I don't have a manual penalty, I've checked.

My average pages per visit is 6 and the average time is 3 min. Average bounce rate is 25%. Average CTR is 9%.  Those metrics don't look too shabby to me... although, I guess I don't know what my competitors metrics are.

I do use Google Adwords and that has been my saving grace... my ad still appears in position 1-2.

Oh, and my local search has improved some... it didn't drop at all.

[Justian]

One way to find out if a link is "good" or "bad" is to make a search for the site on google. If the Website is not listed in the top that would be a clear sign that this place is not the right one to get a link from (old method).

About "effort in removing them" If the link potentially can hurt you in the long run it should be worth your time to remove the link

Google will not penalize you for doing "the right thing". In reality your are doing the work they have been doing for ages. By removing the links you are practically telling google "I don't want those links to count for anything"

About rankings keep in mind that factors like "time on site", "bouncerate", CTR and lots of other stuff comes into account.

If I was you I would take a step back, have a look at the on page optimization and usability of the pages that you want to rank well, and then look at your competitors and see what they are doing different or better. Do they have more rich data? more deeplink into the page?

[MChuckGreen]

Google will not penalize you for removing links, although your rankings may drop if you remove links that are helping you rank.

But keep in mind that links that are helping you rank today, could end up causing a penalty tomorrow. If your links are spammy, Google will eventually catch up, it's just a question of when. To be safe, you should remove blatantly spammy links.

Keep in mind that there are hundreds of ranking signals. Just because Moz is reporting that your PA/DA is better than the competition does't mean you _should _be outranking them.

Some traits of bad links:

• The link's anchor text exactly matches your target keywords (eg. "Miami Auto Repair Shop")
• The link is on a website that is unrelated to yours and likely has little traffic/readership
• You paid to have the link placed
• You "submitted" an article to get the link posted
• You control the site that the link is on
• The link is in a link farm/directory (a site/page with a bunch of links that are intended only to impact SEO)

Hope this helps! I'm happy to give you my input on specific examples if you have them.