Need advice on removing irrelevant backlinks

[gdouglas131]

Hi everyone,

This is my first post on here. I'm pretty new to SEO, but am trying to learn as fast as I can.

I'm hoping someone can give me some advice on how to handle some backlinks.

I have a client that manufactures an industrial product. The president of the company also happens to be a car junkie. I found out about his love of cars through auditing the site's backlinks.

Generally, I think their link profile is pretty good. (please let me know if I'm wrong) They have 114 domains pointing to them, most of which are related industry sites or directories. Most are linked from the URL or the company name. Their site is almost 12 years' old and it has accumulated some random links over time, but no spam, #*$!, gambling, etc.

My main concern is about their largest source of links. The client has an account on a car forum where he has added a link on his profile to his company's site. Every time he posts in the forum, a link goes back to his site. And he posts ... a lot. He's been posting in this forum since 2002 and there are over 800 links pointing from the car site to their homepage - this makes up about a quarter of their overall links. The car forum isn't relevant to his business at all.

He is not trying to do anything black hat here. He likely has no idea this is even happening, he just put his company's web address in his profile.

They took a major hit to their rankings in the spring of 2012 (long before I started working for them), which I think was a result of Penguin 1.1. I'm thinking that the car links probably lost their value at this point, which is part of the reason the site dropped in rankings.

My question is about whether I should try to take these car links down? I figure the links probably aren't helping his site much, but could they be hurting it?

I'm still a little confused on the whole Penguin thing, I guess. Is this update more about removing the value of irrelevant or low quality links, or is it actually penalizing the site for these links. I'm leaning toward the former, but I'd like some expert opinions.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[goodroi]

A simple test I use when debating over questionable backlinks is to look at how much traffic has come in from the source. If you look at your analytics did this link generate you any traffic?

I also doubt there is much link juice coming in (even if there are 800 links). These links are coming from individual threads which are probably deep on the forum. 800 sounds like a big amount but if I offered you 800 pennies you probably wouldn't think it is a big amount.

[sulbha]

Disavow those links.

[gdouglas131]

Thanks for the feedback! goodroi, they don't get any traffic from the site. I also thought there was minimal link juice coming from the site, but didn't want to remove it just in case.

I'll contact my client on Monday; hopefully removing the link from his profile will remove all of the links.

goodroi, if that doesn't work, do you think I should disavow?

[goodroi]

Removing is better than disavowing. If you can't remove than disavow. Don't forget to also build up your positive quality signals.

[Planet13]

Removing is better than disavowing.

+1

Also, have you checked if those links are tagged with a nofollow tag yet? Often, forum profile links are nofollow and would have zero negative effect.

If those links bring in traffic AND they have not been tagged as nofollow links, then another option is to have the links point to a different URL that redirects through a script to the target destination page.

I haven't done this myself, so I can't give the particulars, but it is more or less the same thing that people who run advertisements on their sites do so that they aren't flowing link juice / page rank to the sites of their advertisers.

Google doesn't want your site to flow page rank to another site simply because they advertise on your site. Hence, the need for a script to remove the link juice.

(Not sure if this is still done in lieu of just using a nofollow link.)

[Hoople]

I had one client add his URL to his forum avatar (profile picture) and remove it from the text portion of the signature.

Another option is to place the URL in their bio/profile text that doesn't get appended to every posting.

One action, both happy!