Hi Adam,
I believe these tool is a quality tool. However having said that. There are of course aspects that an automated tool can never tell you if it's the right fit for your website. That tool does not know every single thing about your website and exactly how relevant all the links are to your website. It really takes an SEO with a good amount of knowledge to do this.
Link research tools is a fine product. If it were me and I was worried about bad links I would use something like this http://www.removeem.com/ instead of link research tools the reason I would do this is this company removeem is a sister company of http://www.virante.org/ a highly respected SEO company that is recommended by SEOmoz
there is a site I am working on right now it had roughly 20,000 links per page that were bad links I just put the domain through removeem.com and it gave me this basic information. Now this is free for any website, and I encourage you to put your website through it and compare the results.
"Via only 1 (domain) data source, we estimate about 1482 links with suspicious anchor text ignoring 5224 safe links automatically. Some of these may need to be removed!"
The big difference here is we have 5 people working on this particular case above this is a very complex and extremely hard to fix issue I'm speaking about the data that you're looking the above.
The thing I would like to know is if you want these links removed and you should remove them if you can. How do you want to go about this?
The benefits of the site removeem.com are it gives you two options 1st is self-serve where they do not charge you nearly as much because you get templates and advice on how to write the webmasters that are hosting the offending links. I don't believe LinkRessearchTools provides that that however I could be wrong.
To be completely forthright with you about what I think's going to happen from doing this stuff. Unfortunately, you can have the best detection tools in the world, and it is fantastic that you are looking out for your site. However it is extremely hard to actually get one of these people to remove the links. Why? Most of them are running sites that are no longer indexed there just sitting on a server, and there's no one at home essentially. Or they're getting bombarded with the same requests and just don't care.
For instance I know many people bribe the offending link webmaster to get rid of links it's not pretty, but it works. I wouldn't suggest that unless it was dire to your business.
in cases like this you want professional to look over your website and tell you if there's an issue or not. If they are actually the links are that evil or if there even going to be able to be removed without using Google's disavowal tool. If you want in my opinion the best answer to that. I would be more than happy to help you at the same time
please feel free to
contact my friend Steve at Portent
206.575.3740
http://www.portent.com/
they are a top quality firm recommended by SEOmoz I will vouch personally for them. The reason I'm telling you to do this is you'll get an actual human being that will assess your website if you look below this is at no cost. I would rather take an expert's advice than an automated tools any day.
http://www.portent.com/services/services-seo/services-seo-packages/seo-consulting/google-penalty-recovery.htm
WHAT YOU GET:
A free, initial 10-minute evaluation.
A complete evaluation of your site, links and relevant ranking factors.
Suspected penalties, if any, and causes.
Specific link removal recommendations.
A real person, on the phone, working with your team and answering questions.
Help drafting your re-inclusion request, if necessary.
Steps towards a long-term, less-vulnerable SEO strategy.
Right away. Pronto. Speedily.
Having said all that I also do this. So please feel free to contact me as well
Thomas Zickell
603-978-1964
tzickell@blueprintmarketing.com
http://www.blueprintmarketing.com
The offer that Portent has right now is something that I don't think you're going to find Anywhere very easily. To get somebody of their expertise to locate your website and give you a straight response is worth a lot of money and because they're willing to give you this evaluation I would help them by sending an information from LinkRessearchTools on what prompted you to believe that they are toxic links.
I would also use http://builtwith.com/ and put your URL in there's no cost and this tool will show them exactly what type of website you are running. All these things are of course important, and I believe that this will be the best answer to your question.
It might not hurt to run your site through this for free as well however I want to explain to you the tools that Portent has developed in-house for this are far more complex than any of the ones that were talking about. however it would be wise to see if LinkRessearchTools and
http://www.removeem.com/
Are each showing the same amount of links roughly. Or errors
If I have left anything out or if you need assistance in any manner please feel free to contact me regarding this.
I do believe it is smart to remove any toxic links before Google comes and tells you to remove them. However, the smartest thing to do is have your website assessed by some of the best in the industry, and they will tell you quickly rather not you need to act quickly or if you can to some simple things Fix anything that might be a problem.
I hope I have been of help to you and please know If I can be of more assistance to.
Sincerely,
Thomas