How do I get rid of irrelevant back links pointing to missing pages on my site

[getzen56]

Hi all,

My site was hacked about a year ago and as a result I now have a ton of back links from irrelevant sites pointing to pages on my site that no longer exist. The followed back links section on the Competitive domain analysis tool shows about 3 pages worth of these horrible links.

I have 2 questions: how bad is this for my site's SEO (which isn't good anyway, Page Rank 0) and how do I get rid of them?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Andy

WkXz0

[ShaMenz]

Hi getzen,

The primary problem here is that these links are resulting in 404's which can hurt your site.

If they are just not terribly relevant, but may produce traffic that is useful to you, then you can create a nice "Oops!" page to give visitors options to go to other pages on your site (we call this our "Bounce Page").  This is preferable to a "catch-all" redirect to your home page when you know that the likelihood of a high bounce rate is a concern, since Bounce is now known to be a ranking factor for major Search Engines.

If you are clever with the design of this page you can create ways to keep these non-relevant visitors on the page (rotating banners with funny or clever images, or maybe a video embed could be used).

The primary goal is to eliminate the 404 Errors, but to also be mindful of the impact of Bounce.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[TheARKlady]

I just asked a similar question here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-do-you-deal-with-spammy-backlinks and it will give you a few more perspectives but mostly everyone says not to worry about it.

[Highland]

Incoming links, in general, can't hurt you. I wouldn't worry about it, especially if they're pointed to dead pages (i.e. 404) on your site.