How do you deal with spammy backlinks?

[TheARKlady]

One of the web designers I work with asked me to do a preliminary site assessment on a small business website.

The owner of the business had a falling out with his previous web designer and moved over to the one I work with earlier this year.

The site has been redesigned but when analyzing the back links I discovered that the previous designer had created directories to create backlinks to the page. The PR 0 links from the site number about 150 and are from unrelated topic pages.

So, it made me wonder, how much damage can spammy backlinks do?

What is the best practice to deal with spammy backlinks if you find them?

[AdForce1]

hi

i have a question related to this but havent got answers yet

i have purchased a lot of different domains and realize now that many of them have backlinks from pornsite and maybe even spamming sites.

will that effect the sites i am about to link to?

i give you an example

i purchase domain abcdef.com which has over 1.000.000 backlinks from different sites, all from adult to spammy - many of them also good

I put a simple wordpress blog on abcdef.com and write an article about sexdating or sextoys and link to fx. sexshop.com and sexdating.com which are also adult sites - will this help the ranking for sexshop.com and sexdating.com or will it hurt them?

thx

[AdForce1]

hi

i have a question related to this but havent got answers yet

i have purchased a lot of different domains and realize now that many of them have backlinks from pornsite and maybe even spamming sites.

will that effect the sites i am about to link to?

i give you an example

i purchase domain abcdef.com which has over 1.000.000 backlinks from different sites, all from adult to spammy - many of them also good

I put a simple wordpress blog on abcdef.com and write an article about sexdating or sextoys and link to fx. sexshop.com and sexdating.com which are also adult sites - will this help the ranking for sexshop.com and sexdating.com or will it hurt them?

thx

[NerdsOnCall]

Since there are a few different opinions on this topic, I figured I would weigh in.

A bad backlink profile can effect a sites SERPS, but it depends on the site. If your site has a mostly White Hat, clean on-page strategy, and mostly good backlink history, you should be fine. If your site has a lot of authority, then the bad back links definitely won't hurt you, they might even help you (read this), but be careful, because you still don't want to get to careless.

I would say that you should remove as many links as you can, and then forget about the rest. If you move forward and build a strong link profile that is filled with editorial links, and legitimately acquired reviews, you'll be fine.

Best of luck

-Bryant Jaquez

[TheARKlady]

Yes, I've been building back links and it is good to know that it isn't too much to worry about.

[TheARKlady]

Thanks Ross, that makes sense. Great to hear.

[TheARKlady]

Thanks for your opinion. Actually, there was one porn page that linked over from the designer. It was one of the reasons the concern arose.

[JamesNorquay]

To add too the comments above specific spammy backlinks can infact hurt your site,

For example if all of a sudden you see a number of links to your website with anchor text to adult terms pointing to your website with your url from adult based websites. I have seen targeted spam in this way affecting websites.

But from what you explain the links that have been built by the prior designer do not seem tat bad at all, I would not worry too much.

[APICDA]

I second the comment from Ross.  I had a similar issue in the recent past.  I found it best and easiest to try and forget about the bad back links and move forward with building  quality ones....... just my two cents.

[rtavs]

Hi SEOWriter,

Backlinks cannot hurt your website. Google will devalue the links bu they will not penalise you for having them. If they did penalise you for having spammy backlinks the first thing everyone would do is load up their favourite blog commenting software and blast a bunch of spammy links to the competitor website.

However, if you are really worried about the backlinks because they are paid links or on a site with malware on it. Contact the website owner and ask for them to be removed. Failing this I would just start a quality link building campaign and keep everything ncie and varied.

In my experience crap links from directories dont harm your site, and if your keyword is VERY low competition they will actually help it.