Is It Required to Clean Natural Backlinks from an Irrelevant Niche?

[Prabhu.Sundar]

Hi Friends,

My company website is a Travel related website and it is 18 years old domain. We purchased this domain in the year 2010 from a 3rd party person. That person was using the domain as a software portal like brothersoft.com. That person generated so many backlinks from software related websites like forums, gaming websites and so on. So, do I need to clean all those backlinks now because all those backlinks are from high page rank websites.

Not only the above concern I have. My website is very popular in Saudi and we get lot of backlinks naturally sometimes from the irrelevant niche. So, is it necessary to clean up those backlinks also. Pls advice me on this.

[Bill.Sebald]

Google still internally values / devalues the links they discovered based on their algos. I think in 2011, when penalties and WMT notifications started to pop up, many SEOs forgot that Google still does a good amount of this internally.  They'll react when it's egregious.

If you see pure spam in your backlink profile, Google suggests you go ahead and disavow. If you see otherwise good domains that are irrelevant (which it sounds like you do), then there's no reason to panic until Google misreads the intent and thinks you're trying to game the algorithm.  If you're not doing that, you're probably in fine shape continuing to build good relevant links and creating the most relevant and valuable website possible.

egregious

[Highland]

Link audits are always helpful (hence why Moz specializes in them) but you want to identify bad or poor links. Relevancy is something that Google will determine for itself. I mean if a tire shop is linking to a florist Google might not give that link much weight but what if the tire shop has a blog and they want to thank said florist for sending flowers after a coworker dies? Google might not give it a lot of relevance to it, but it's also not necessarily spam.

Unless you can clearly identify that a given link is actively hurting you, I wouldn't remove/disavow it. Remember that link disavow is a flamethrower in that it can kill weeds and burn your house down. Which it does depends a lot on how you use it.

[ClaytonJ]

Periodically you should do a link audit.  I call it a link detox and it is an ongoing issue for most sites.

It is really up to how how to judge a link but I use a combination of tools inclusion moz and majestic. Trust is a big factor. There are several factors to look at in undertaking a link audit.

Review https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

Hope that assists.  All that said if your site has never had a penalty I would do a tidy up, and be conservative in my disallows.