Bad link highlighter

So, a few years ago, we paid an Indian SEO company to do some link building for us on our UK website. They didn’t cost much so we didn’t really take much notice. Once we did take notice, we immediately ceased their spammy link service. Unfortunately the damage was already done and a couple years on, in mid 2012 the google penguin update penalised our website in the UK big time.

Since there were 50,000 links to sort through, we had trouble working out which ones we bad and which ones were good so I made this spreadsheet to help highlight the bad ones.

This can be used for check your healthy sites for potential future risks and help recover from any penalties that you have already.

Download Excel File Here

INSTRUCTIONS

• Paste in data for all the pink columns on the 2nd sheet. For the first column you can use ahref rank, seomoz link metric or majestic seo link score
• A low scoring link in the first column doesn’t mean it’s a bad link. If you have too many low scoring links though, it’s not natural.
• If the “Anchor Text Abuse Index” is orange or yellow, it needs attention. If it is RED, it is probably a high risk of being spam and needs to be carefully looked at. Consider serious action.
• Remove internal links or consider internal link structure as it can sometimes be anchor text spammy as well. I’m not sure if this can be a problem or not.
• At the top of the example tab, you can see the red in the Anchor Text Abuse Index that words like “London car hire” is spam. These links had to be removed and/or disavowed as they are unwanted from a scam SEO company many years ago.