How to know which links to remove?

[jammy8891]

What is your general approach when removing links for a new client? Just taken on some new work and found links that I wouldn't dream of building now (unrelated domain name, blogroll, single word, exact match anchor, dead sites).

However some of these are brand anchor links, and some of the pages have decent Page Rank (2/3/4). Obviously I don't want to remove links that might actually be helping the site in a weird way. It would be good to get an idea of other peoples approach to link removal - what goes, what stays etc?

[Propools]

Good rule of thumb would be to "view" these sites as a user would.
1. Are they helpful?
2. Do they provide relevant information or is it boiler plate or scraped data?
3. Are they an affiliate driven site?
4. What is the quality score for the site?

That's only a little of the criteria we use.
Hope that helps.

[helenp]

I wonder how you find the links to remove, and if it is really necesarry, I know google has the removal tool.
How can one know what links hurts your site? If I enter my links in webmaster tools, and when I see a strange domain name linking to my site, I enter the domain and in many cases the site are chinese or russian.

[Propools]

I would think you would want those links removed unless there's a good reason to keep them. It's these kind of links which drove me to think of the disavow tool.

[helenp]

I would think you would want those links removed unless there's a good reason to keep them. It's these kind of links which drove me to think of the disavow tool.

My site is a travel site, so how can I know these are not good links? chinese and russians do travel also, the thing is that google webmaster tool doesnt tell the page where the link is on, it only says the domain, and to search for it in chinese......
Its really complicated.

[helenp]

I answer myself:

On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
On the Dashboard, click Traffic, and then click Links to Your Site.
Under Who links the most, click More.
Click Download more sample links. If you click Download latest links, you'll see dates as well.

[netmeg]

The big question for me is - ask your new client if he/she did *anything at all* to obtain these links - did they buy a service, or hire someone to build them, or in any way influence their placement. Then ask them again and decide whether or not they're telling the truth.

From that you should get your answer on what to do next.

I've never done any real linkbuilding in my life (too much work) and I don't worry about garbage scraper links that show up in GWT. I have a ton of them, but I'm not really worried about them.

However I've had clients who have hired services that put them in spammy link directories and link wheels, and I would disavow those in a heartbeat (we didn't have the Disavow tool back when I was I was dealing with that, but I'd probably use it if this situation popped up again with a new client)