Link Spring Clean

[wearehappymedia]

Hey,

Based on the most up to date thinking - what's the best way to approach a link spring clean?

We've got a site with a large amount of links (a few of which look a bit spammy - SEO directories etc)

Also, the brand changed it's name and URL a while back so there are directory/web citations using the old URL and sometimes the old name. The old URL is 301'd but I'm thinking (especially in terms of local SEO) these citations with differnt business names/numbers/web addresses could be particularly harmful?

Cheers!

[wearehappymedia]

That's really helpful Paddy - Thanks!

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Radi,

In terms of cleaning up your links, there is a good article here on Moz which may help with the process and it's still relevant:

https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal

Even though this is for penalty removal, step 3 talks about how to spot low quality links and before that, the article talks about how to gather your link data. I also wrote this guide a while ago which is still relevant except for the use of PageRank which is probably too out of date now. But the process is still relevant:

http://www.stateofdigital.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/

To give you a very quick overview of the process, I tend to use something like this:

1. Gather all of your backlink data using Google Search Console, Open Site Explorer, Majestic and AHREFs
2. Combine it all into one dataset and remove duplicates
3. Look for patterns of links that may be low quality such as spammy anchor text, directories, article submissions etc
4. Review them in more detail to assess the quality

In terms of the citations for the old business name, these on their own shouldn't be harmful - it's perfectly normal for businesses to change names / rebrand etc. It's only an issue if the citations / links are low quality. It is probably worth changing the citations to the new business name where possible just to make sure that Google pass across any equity for them.

I hope that helps!

Paddy