Using the Moz to weed out bad backlinks

[marketing-man1990]

How do you use the opensite explorer to weed out bad backlinks in your profile, and then how do you remove them if you cannot contact the various webmasters.

[DennisSeymour]

Just using OSE? I would arrange the links you export by PA. Start with the lowest number and work your way up removing the good looking links so you are left with the bad links

If you want to use other tools, you can use scrapebox, or even http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/ to detect their PR first. (or better yet, check if the link is indexed in google before checking PR)

If it's deindexed, then you dont have to bother wasting your time on it. Put it on a separate list and contact for removal once you are done sorting out the links. If the link is not present anymore but the site is bad, disavow it.

PS. I would also export links from google webmaster tools

[matbennett]

If you can't contact them and they are links that you don't want to count for (or against!) your website then you should disavow them.

Interestingly, Googler John Mueller this week did a Google hangout where the question of the difference between disavow and removal was discussed.  If you haven't received a warning of manual penalty then there is apparently "virtually no difference". That makes disavow a much more efficient way of dealing with the issue anyway.

video of hangout here  Approx 14 mins 40 secs