How to detect bad links?

[cangoou]

Hello!

When a page does not rank or is in a penalty, the advice often is to get more "good" links and get rid of the "bad" links. The question of course is: How can you detect if a link is "bad"?

I would assume 2 things:
- To many outgoing links on the source-page
- The source-page doesn't rank well
... but are there other ways to detect a bad link?

The other question is: How far do you have to go? Imagine you have a site "C" getting links from site "B". "B" is getting links from "A" like:
A -> B -> C
If "A" has no trust or some kind of penalty: Can this "bad juice" be delivered to your site "C"?

[FranticFish]

If being two steps away from a bad neighbourhood was enough to clobber you then I think a lot of sites would be in trouble.

1) too many outgoing links on the source page
2) Source page doesnt rank well
Neither are to my mind definite indicators of quality either way.

I'd say if it looks weak, looks crap then it probably is. I don't personally care whether it's ranking now. I care about whether it is a decent page on a decent site. That way I hope I won't have to worry about it 6 months or even 2 years down the line.

If you're after long-term stablility then worrying about what you might get away with right now and what might squeak over the line to the side of acceptable is not wise. I see lots of stuff working right now that Google say they are against.

Last, are you sure it's only links?

The OOP I've personally seen - only one coz I'm so squeaky-clean :) - was caused and fixed by adjusting content.

1) over aggressive on-page optimisation
Just too much repetition and not enough other text.
2) too tight a phrase group
Not enough variation in the text and too many similar pages.

Fixed both and it popped back in, without having to adjust the links. I did expand the anchor texts and get different links too to be on the safe side after that. That was 3 years ago and I don't use those links or those techniques any more and I don't have those problems.

Are you sure that your text is still not over-optimised? I've seen people swear blind how natural their text is with ridiculous KWDs of 10-15%.

[cangoou]

Thanks for your reply. The first thing I did was reducing onpage KWD: Now I have the keyword once in the title and once in the text - reducing it more would make the page completly irrelevant I guess ;-)

I thought it would be generally a good idea to have a look at your links - no matter if the site has got a penalty or not. On one site I detected some links which where suspicius to me and ask to get them removed - which resulted in a jump from #22 to #4.

But I only guessed that the links were bad - to have some tangible facts to see if a link is bad would be a great thing.

[aristotle]

About a year ago I noticed that someone (or possibly some automated program) had created several dozen links from #*$! sites to one of my sites. I was very worried about this, but after a few weeks went by there was still no effect on the site's rankings, so these "bad links" apparently caused no harm. Also, they disappeared a couple of months later. I still don't understand exactly how or why this happened.

[FranticFish]

tangible facts to see if a link is bad

Secret Sauce! Your instinct seems to have served you well on the site you mentioned, so I'd follow it. Put your Jiminy Cricket hat on when you think about links and I doubt you can go far wrong. If it looks dodgy then it is dodgy and if your site isn't disposable you're best avoiding it.