How do I determine which backlinks are bad?

A year ago, my site was ranked on the first page for nearly every search term. Now, I have dropped way,way back. I have rebuilt my site to make it Pand/Penguin friendly but still have no improvement. I feel that bad backlinks may be the culprit. From the reports that I have run, I have over 40,000 back links to my web design site. How can I determine which ones Google doesn't like...and, is there an easy way to get them removed other than manually through Google Webmaster Tools?

 

Spammed website backlinks are always bad. Like ones created with xrumer, scrapebox etc. I would recommend you look for a SEO service provider who have the knowledge to get your website to be google safe. If you are do it on your own. Then building high quality links would be the best way to begin.

 

To eliminate a large number of them, take a look at the websites that the links are one.
If those websites are full of duplicate content, spammy links or thin content sites, they are likely negatively affecting you.

 

Is there a way to determine which links were spammed?

 

I'd recommend doing the following:

1. Start by checking Google Webmaster Tools to make sure there are no manual actions against your site.
2. Do a audit of your inbound link anchor text. If too high a % of the links are keyword rich (over 10-20%), you may have algorithmic penalty against your site. If that's the case, then you need to correct that in one or more of three ways: 1. build new links that don't have keywords, change the anchor text for existing links so they don't have keywords, remove/disavow existing links that have keywords.
3. If you still haven't improved, do an audit of the links themselves and look for any glaring issues. This may be websites that have sitewide links to your site, links from low quality directories, blog comment links, forum links, etc. If there's a lot of these, then you may want to try to have them removed or disavow them. Then again, if you don't have a manual penalty against you, then I usually recommend just building your way out. That way you're building links and growing stronger instead of removing links and potentially getting weaker.

Lastly, you should keep something in mind. If you do have a lot of poor quality or spammy links, then it's likely that Google has devalued a lot of those links. Google is getting better at doing that and often times they will do that without taking manual action against a site. If that's the case, then you've simply lost authority in the search engines...and it isn't coming back. There isn't a simple little fix which would suddenly get you all your pagerank back. You just have to build you're way up again, this time with good, natural links.

 

WOW! GREAT ADVICE! Thanks.

 

No manual actions in Google. Many of my inbound links are "www.clevelandwebsitedesigner.com" or "website design" and variations of keywords. What do you recommend I change the anchor text to (lestrj)???

 

If your website is clevelandwebsitedesigner.com, then those are fine. As for "website design", if you have access to them, you could change them to any number of things. Some common non-tarted anchor text example are:

• Your company name
• Your company URL
• The URL of the specific page being linked to
• Your name (especially for blog comments and signatures)
• "click here"
• "more info"

 

Here is one great tip shared by a friend who faced this problem.
There are millions of links pointing to one of his pages on his website.
He had actually released few free wordpress themes years ago and they are used by spammers of all kind,
these websites had my friend's website link in the footer.
What he did was removed that page resulting all the linkbacks pointing to a 404 page.
Though he is still waiting for some improvements in the traffic.
I agree with @lesterj with his comment that if you have lost the authority in search engines, it would be too hard to get back there.
I have lost one of my blog to this panda/penguin thing.

 

Use the Google disavow tool to remove those spammy backlinks. You can use tools such as link detox to make it easier for you. I would also recommend that you hire an SEO agency to find out which links are wrong.

 

use ‘Link Disavow Tool’......

 

It is very difficult to find out bad back links from 40000 links.Use Back link checker tools like Open site explorer and others and make a list of your back links and get idea about the relations the links and your content, you may check links by page by page.But I strongly suggest you to get idea about the pages from Google analytic first and do manually remove as much you can and then submit the bad back links to Google Link Disavow.
From your comments I think your web site did do not Organically SEO.You should immediately do On page seo and must get popular back links.
thanks for sharing these.

 

Don't waste your time with link detox or the disavow tool, it doesn't work. Go read all the horror stories associated with using that tool. You are not doing anything but telling Google about all the bad links you have created and all the unnatural link building you did. If the disavow tool could be used as intended it would be easy to abuse. Google knows that which is why they don't allow for abuse.

 

A record of spammy links that originates from low quality websites that cause the downfall of your website will always be in the history of Google. I think link removal is no use because big G already knew. Don't focus on erasing your mistakes in the past but concentrate on providing things that will establish your site to gain trust from your targeted audience by providing engaging content. And that's will make Google proud of your website

There is no such thing as "Google safe" website

 

Yikes! Maybe SEO isn't best for you? I don't mean to deter you but with this logic I could throw up Scrapebox and ruin all of your sites knowing that you'd give up a site because "the big G already knew".

 

Eeek! I didn't say that SEO is not best for me I posted this because its according to my experience and I'm not relying on others opinion because I have my own understanding in SEO. It is true that even you removed your bad links within your profile Google still recognized your site that you has a history of violating quality guidelines.

Eeek! I didn't say this You don't catch up my point