Finding and Removing bad backlinks

[k9byron]

Ok here goes.

Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder.

1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile.

2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it?

3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links?

4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing?  My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed?

I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake.

Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Ah okay - that notice is definitely a factor then and an important consideration not initially mentioned.  So as long as you have someone else working on the other issues described then we can focus on the patterns concept I initially mentioned.

Several things that stand out when I'm reviewing links on a mass scale.I prefer to look at links grouped by domain in the first pass to help see these patterns.

1. Page titles of pages sending links.  Quite often, they're titles that blatantly scream junk/low-quality or irrelevant to any topic your site is about, or even link-partnerships... or even outright mention SEO.

2. Domain names/URLs of pages sending links. Same concept - they can quite often obviously communicate that they're junk, irrelevant, or blatantly specifically sites for SEO or links.

3. Anchor Text - if you group by anchor text as a next pass, look for links where the anchor text is exact match keywords and then look at the page title of that linking page and it's domain name.  Patterns can be spotted of low quality.  If needed, you can click over to a URL and just look at the page that  link is coming from.

4. After all that process, as you have marked links as being bad, regroup them by domain.  At that point you will likely still need to go through remaining links and go to at least one link from each domain to examine the page or just look at the overall domain for quality.

NOTE - the part where you examine a site sending links does require you to be able to know how to spot a bad site already.  Like - "Can I trust this site?" "Is this site obviously a fake site?" and other such questions need to be asked and answered.

And if a link is on a good site, is it a forum or blog comment?  Is it using an SEO relevant keyword as the person's signature name? Or is it even a legitimate and relevant comment, even if the link isn't using keyword anchors?

There are so many subtle indicators I could add but in reality the best way to go is to dive in and remember to look for patterns.  As you spend the time doing this work, patterns become more and more obvious...

[k9byron]

We did receive a message from google about inorganic links. Also, our page speed right now has to do with us changing hosts. We know about those issues, and about our on site SEO problems. Like I said in my post, MY task is to try to make sure that I remove any links that may be hurting us, fix any broken ones and make sure that our link profile is as natural as can be. There are other people tasked with the issues you are talking about, I am just trying to get a handle on what I need to do.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Evaluating links is a very time-consuming process.  You need to be able to look for "patterns" as a primary task IF you need to worry about links.

HOWEVER

I will also say this - your on-site SEO is suffering and just as likely or even MORE likely to be your primary problem. Why? Because you have not stated that you received a notice from Google informing you that your site was flagged for bad links.  If you did NOT get such a notice, while a poor overall link profile can certainly contribute to a generally declining ranking footprint, it's less likely to be the PRIMARY concern.

For example:  Your "Accessories and batteries" category has a terrible topical focus. The page Title doesn't mention what they're accessories or batteries for.  Which means from the very first point of reference on-site, that page fails to communicate the refined focus of the category.  Accessories could be about ANYTHING. And so could batteries.

Then, on that page, the header text "Accessories and Batteries" neither includes that topical clarification, nor is it even a proper "h1" header tag.  There's no descriptive paragraph based content on the page reinforcing and strengthening that topical focus.  Your Canonical tag is NOT SEO best practices for pagination in 2012, and thus that results in massive amounts of content within a category not properly being identified to further reinforce topical authority.  (You should instead be using rel-next/rel-prev and NOT using canonicalization on paginated content, every page title should be unique, and every page within a set should be properly reinforced with it's own h1 tag).

You're not even close to having enough depth of content on product pages (one sentence for the "detailed description), so with all the "related" . product content, sidebar navigation and other "off-topic" content, there's a lot of content on your site deemed "thin" content.

You have SEVERE page speed problems, a very serious SEO factor in 2012. (tools.pingdom.com reported a 9.3 second load time for the home page and URIValet.com reported 15 seconds).

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface here, because you have a SERIOUS on-site SEO problem that you've apparently either failed to understand or chosen to ignore in this question, which indicates there could be MANY more problems on the site.

Heck - several "minor" template fixes alone could boost your SEO, though if you really want to win, you'd be wise to really address all the high priority factors on-site.