A WebmasterWorld thread has a webmaster who seems to have been hit by the Penguin 2.0 update. He is now asking how he should go about discovering which of his links are spammy.
He asked in the thread:
The only thing I can think of is that I may have spammy backlinks. I have 1500 backlinks but do not recognise all the sites that link back to me. How can I find out whether they are spammy and harm my website?
He also details some of the ways he initially acquired those 1,500 backlinks and some of those techniques are a red flag. Now what?
Some suggestions on how to discover the bad links include using Google Webmaster Tools link report. Download all the links and go through each one manually.
Others suggest you use a third-party link tool like Majestic SEO, Raven Tools, SEOmoz (now Moz) or others to get a more complete picture of your links.
You can also use Bing Webmaster Tools.
Either way, with only 1,500 links - I'd spend the time going through each one manually and disavowing the bad ones.
He started the process and was shocked on what he found:
I now had time to look more thoroughly at my backlinks.Goodness, there is some junk in there: from Russian #*$! sites to numerous article sites that I never posted on.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: See our story named Have Links To Disavow? Google Says Google Webmaster Tools Link Report Is Enough.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for one bad link image
