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There isn't much traffic at all as the link is actually in a sub-sub-menu in the nav (the strange things people do).

But I'm more concerned whether removing the link will actually have a negative effect on our SEO

Yeah it's linked with our company name so not too dodgey

We also have other sites linking sitewide with our logo, also not paid, just people are saying we are good place to get info from. Some of these are in the sidebar so could look like paid ads..

We have 10,000 links from 350 domains in OSE. Probably 97% of those links are organic. Do you think that would be causing an impact?

Thanks Irving. The issue isn't so much about removing all the links, but rather what to do with sitewide ones that provide a disproportionate amount of links from one domain.

Should they be dealt to, we could ask them to remove it or make it nofollow, or should we just roll on with the rest of our SEO work, and only respond to that issue if we see a manual penalty?

You're right about dodgey ones too, definitely worth dealing to them now.

Yeah that was my feeling too.

However their response is that we are being algorithmically penalized because we have a 10,000's of links from 100's of domains, so a large amount of those links are potentially site wide.

(1 site for example has 100,000's pages with us in their main sitewide navigation).

So to move forward with our SEO work we first need to remove the links that appear inorganic.

Could this be possible or do links only need to be removed when you have a link warning?

Hey there,

We have recently been in touch with a SEO agency that recomended we remove all inorganic links from our backlink profile.

Most of the links are pretty good but there are some news sites that have sitewide links to our site. The link is in the nav menu, as a useful link. We didn't ask for this link it was totally organic.

Also some link building in the past was focused on anchor text so some of the keywords may have been over emphasised.

Is it a good idea to go about removing all of the potentially inorganic looking links?

My concern is that we wipe out links that google are actually valuing. I still know sites are ranking #1 with much more dubious backlink profiles, and then there's this guy who removed his sitewide backlinks and dropped in his ranking:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/removed-site-wide-links

If a competitor decided to add negative links to our site, it would take longer to find and remove negative links than it would for them to add them. It seems odd that google would allow negative SEO to be that easy..

What do you think?

Haha well done

Yep this is very helpful. I see you have lots of good rankings too. Do you get a lot of search traffic from them?

Hey Francisco,

Yeah I agree with you on the exact match domain, and I think you're right about opting for the memorable brandable domain.

But what do you mean about using the homepage as a representation of all the landing pages?

How do you avoid the homepage competing with the sub pages?

Thanks man!

Hey Moosa,

Thanks for your response.

Wouldn't there be an issue of diluting my onpage optimisation if I tried to target multiple keywords on my homepage? (especially in this case where the keywords aren't very complimentary)

And with the sub pages wouldn't that then be competing with the homepage, somewhat cannibalising our SEO efforts across 2 pages?

Is it better to target main keywords on a site's homepage, or in a sub page.

I would usually assume the homepage, but if the domain for the homepage doesn't include the keyword is it better to have a sub page with an exact match URL?

For example we target the keyword "abc123"

Is it better to optimise the homepage:

brandname.com

Or create a page to target it:

brandname.com/abc123/

And leave the homepage to target brand keywords, but link to the "abc123" page.

Whats the best option?

Hey Diane,

Google will rarely penalize a site for it's inbound links. Otherwise it would be too easy for black hat SEO's to get their competitors penalized out of the SERPs. So it is unlikely that the free article sites will damage your SEO reputation.

But it may damage your reputation with Humans, the reputation that counts. Your articles should help to establish your position as an expert in your line of business, sounding like a 2 year old probably doesn't help.

Best thing is to get in contact with reputable blogs or sites in your niche and see if they will run your articles. Or else put the articles on your own site and promote them there to build your traffic up.

Outspoken Media has a good article on promoting your own content, should you be interested:

http://outspokenmedia.com/online-marketing/how-to-promote-good-content/

I have a site I launched a few months back, and the niche isn't all that competitive.

After a bit of work the domain is now sitting near the bottom of page 2 on google but it's number 2 in yahoo search.

I have been manually building the links but they are all targeted to just one keyword, and mainly have the same link text. Will this look suspicious to google, and should I be spreading my anchor text over different keywords?

Or is the reason Im ranking so well in yahoo be because they are just picking up more backlinks? 23 from yahoo but only 9 from google.