Hey guys. I have a question. My site is a member of 12 Topsite websites. I have a link to each of them on each page of my 230+ page website. Do these links hurt my SERP ranking? Would it be advisable to remove all of these links? Would removing them increase my SERP? I only get a small amount of traffic from about four of them.
In my opinion, top sites are not worth your effort. They were more important about 10 years ago, but now most of them are overrun by spam. I personally would not link to that kind of website. Removing those links likely won't improve your search engine rankings, unless they were causing a penalty. If the top site has enough spam it could be causing a penalty as a bad neighborhood link. You probably aren't getting very high quality traffic from these websites anyway. There are certain niches where the traffic might be better quality though. If it were me, I would remove those links.