Removing spammy backlinks

[bowdeni]

I would be grateful to hear if anyone has any experience with this.

I am working on a website that has a bit of a tough history. The previous agency just bought spammy sidebar/footer (out of context) vanity term anchor text links on various websites. Those websites have largely now appear to be penalised.

I are trying to clean up the link profile.

What I am finding is though that when these links are removed in batches of one/two, the site initially suffers in rankings, then recovers again. Is this normal behaviour or something else people have experienced?

Thinking about it it makes sense. If an individual or agency just buy spammy links until the page is penalised, then remove them and place them elsewhere, then that (seems) like a reasonable strategy. By penalising pages when such links are removed, it kinda increases the exit barriers and makes the strategy look less appealing.

Thoughts?

[tedster]

Interesting observation - the possibility is quite intriguing. Are you sure that the paid backlinks were already causing a ranking problem for the website? Or was this a proactive defense on your part, done before any trouble showed up?

[bowdeni]

Sorry I have only just found this thread, I didn't think it got approved. Thanks for replying Tedster.

The nature of the link profile meant that site PR has fallen, for me an indicator of the domain health/trust.

It used to be a PR 6 site, and steadily fell until PR 4. It's a high profile site; enough for Matt Cutts to have used it as an example in his blog.

It's both reactive and proactive. Reactive because we do think it's hurting rankings, but also proactive since the previous link strategy isn't consistent with what where we want to be. Where spammy links exist and haven't been penalised, well we've also removed those too.

We've removed a large amount of these toxic links now and our rankings haven't continued to drop as I mentioned in my previous post. We have fallen to page 3 though, were page 2 in April.

Hoping that any penalty for the work of the previous SEO agency is lifted, or in the very least we are given a fair ranking :)