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Hi Alan,

I would remove the links. If you're indeed suffering from a penguin penalty, your site will suffer as long as you have those links. Ask these directories/sites to remove their links to you, or disavow them. Keep a log of your backlinks, the ones you've identified as spammy, and the actions you've taken to clean up your link profile.

I know you're concerned about removing these links and how it will affect your search rankings. As long as you're under a penalty, your site won't do as well in SERPs. Cleaning up your link profile will get you out of the Google doghouse, and help you on your way to better SERP listings. Make sure you're working to get links from highly authoritative websites, and you'll be in a better position.

Good luck!

Morgan

Hi everyone! I'm one of Distilled's new online marketing analysts and will be writing my first blog post for them right before Christmas! I'm thinking about writing a post that combines the holiday spirit with what we all wish Google would give us. So fine people of Moz Q&A, tell me, if you could have anything from Google, no matter how ridiculous, what would it be and why? Any great quotes may even be featured in the blog post itself and attributed to you! Thanks everyone and happy Friday!

Whenever you change URLs, you'll see an initial drop in traffic as Google finds and reindexes these pages. You should see a bounce back in traffic after that, but it may not be what it was before if you used 301 redirects. 301 redirects only pass 85 - 90% of link equity, so all of the pages you've 301'd are now 10 - 15% less authoritative than they were before. Depending on how you were ranking before and the strength of your competitors, this loss of link equity could have negatively affected your position on SERPs. The only way to get this link equity back is to have all of the pages linking to your old pages link to the new pages (get them to directly link to your new page), or to get enough quality links to your new page that compensate for the loss in equity.

Hi Alan,

I would remove the links. If you're indeed suffering from a penguin penalty, your site will suffer as long as you have those links. Ask these directories/sites to remove their links to you, or disavow them. Keep a log of your backlinks, the ones you've identified as spammy, and the actions you've taken to clean up your link profile.

I know you're concerned about removing these links and how it will affect your search rankings. As long as you're under a penalty, your site won't do as well in SERPs. Cleaning up your link profile will get you out of the Google doghouse, and help you on your way to better SERP listings. Make sure you're working to get links from highly authoritative websites, and you'll be in a better position.

Good luck!

Morgan