Inbound link cleanup and management

[RossM]

Hey guys this is my first time asking a question here but I have been lurking for a while now and have learned a lot here. I have to come up with a plan to go through, analyze, and clean up the existing backlinks for 37 root domains. That to me makes manually looking through the stack one at a time impossible. Obviously there are some great tools and I currently have Moz tools and Raven available to me but am open to acquire something different as well if it makes sense. My questions are:

1. Do I need to worry about nofollow links at all? Should I just separate them out right off the top and be done with that?

2. What ways have you all accomplished this task? Are there any time sucking pitfalls to avoid? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance this site truly has been a blessing to me!

[RossM]

Thank you I will check them out!

[MonicaOConnor]

Link Research Tools is awesome. It can be a little expensive but it is worth every penny.

[MickEdwards]

Personally I wouldn't be worrying about those links. I just meant wholesale links from no doubt spammed domains that are disproportionate to your whole profile. I would just continue building good links to the site.

[RossM]

I have one site with 4224 links from yellow pages which are all no follow. The domain only has 7219 links total. Do I do anything with that? From what I can tell they are not helping me from a ranking / authority perspective but are they hurting me? What you are saying  makes sense to me about being well rounded. 58% of the total links being not follow from one site doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Any thoughts?

[MickEdwards]

I would say in general you could forget about no-follow.  However, and some may disagree with me, I look at those no-follow and if they are screaming dire spam, have a dubious nature and there is volume I treat them just the same as any other link.  Google wants to see a rounded link profile so there will be a bunch of no-follow links in there.  If those links are bad i'd want to let Google know that they are nothing to do with me.  If there is a very small proportion of poor no-follow links then that is probably ok as again that is probably quite natural.

[RossM]

Wow that sounds awesome I will definitely be checking that out! Thank you very much!

[TheWebMastercom]

Check out cognitiveseo.com.  They take all the link metrics from Moz, ahrefs, and majestic (so saves you having to subscribe to each separately to be certain you get all the links) and also allow you to import your webmaster tools data.  They have a tool that allows you to classify links and advise on what are bad links.  As with any automated tool you need to manually check through it all.

Once you have the list, they will even build the disavow file for you.

When I was under a negative SEO attack, it is what I used for 3 or 4 months whilst I managed the disavow process.