Rooting out the bad links can be exhausting, but it’s part of the job. It has to get done so we can do awesome stuff with the good link building without hindrance. Using heuristics for qualitative and metrics from quantitative, I know, on average, whether a link is worth keeping in less than ten seconds; if I have to look at the code, it takes a little longer. There are going to be loads of almosts, mights, and should’a would’a could’a because every site has a different link profile. There are so many “depends” that go into it that it is crucial to take your own site’s history into mind. That being said, these methods should work for finding the domains causing your link-related woes.

Porn, When Your Links Are Showing Too Much

If your site isn’t in the porn industry, you probably don’t want porn links. I have yet to see a case where it made sense. Whenever you have porn links, use your imagination on words to search for in your link data. A good starting point is looking for “xx” or “xxx.” These are used frequently in domain names, titles, and URLs. Other terms are related to body parts and genres of adult entertainment. The hardest part, well, if you’re at work, is spot checking these links. Considering these types of sites aren’t safe for the majority of work environments, I recommend making the window as small as possible so that you can review it. If you’re on a Windows machine, I use the mouse over preview. You’ll be able to comprehend a site’s content real fast based on even a thumbnail-sized image. Sometimes, you will be surprised that a site isn’t pornographic, so the occasional spot check is still suggested when uncertain.

Pills, Not What the Link Doctor Ordered

“Viagra,” “Cialis,” and any other medicine you might take for extremely personal reasons are the normal suspects. The pill names, other than the big brands, are long words and medical sounding. Review the anchor text, URLs, domains, and anywhere you can apply filters to look for the bad words. You want these links gone, and I have not seen a situation where you’d want pill links yet. Maybe, they’ll be okay if you have pharma clients.

Gambling, the House Always Wins

Gambling can be a fun activity, but I really don’t think gambling with your link profile with these types of links is worth it. Common trigger words to look for are “poker,” “casino,” and “gambl.” Gambling links normally show up as a sidebar sitewide link or as an advertisement. In general, they don’t represent as large of a problem as porn and pills, and only pop up from time to time. That being said, gambling links still produce problems in search results and should be deleted.

ccTLDs, the Bottom Level of Linking Domains

The TLD is an easy method of picking out poor links. My favorites are .pl, .ru, and .br. They have been the worst offenders in the past. If you see a pattern of a specific TLD pointing bad links to your site, check them out. Unless your business is international and frequently deals in those other languages, the linking sites might be up to no good in your neighborhood.

Hidden Links

Have you selected all on a webpage recently? People are STILL trying to hide links with white text. Unbelievable! These have to go, and selecting everything on the page is a simple way to find the “white-out” links.

What about when the link is there but you can’t see it? Off to the code with you! Press F12 or CTRL+U to start searching for the link. Once you find the ahref, inspect the element on the page to identify where the bugger is hidden. There shouldn’t be too many of these, but when they exist, they are vile because they are time consuming to find. The positive side of this is that most of the “hidden in the code like a ninja” links are sitewide, so you get to bust a whole bunch at once.

The Blank Slate Blog

There are several telltale signs of a blank slate blog: generic, starter WordPress theme (often, still on a WordPress subdomain), no blog comments, spun content (does not make sense when read), no internal links, bulk content uploads on the same day, exact-match domains (EMDs), excessive advertising, and no social profile links. It takes a only ten or so seconds to complete a quick scan on the content to look for these clues. When boxes aren’t checked, the game is afoot; the blog is not being updated, stinks, or is part of a network – all good reasons to remove and disavow those links.

Farming, Not Grassfed, Natural, Organic Links

The number of external links on a page can be an indicator of whether the page is good or not. We’ve seen classic examples of link farms. It’s hard to put a number on “how many is too many” because the site might have poor optimization and their navigation is full of junk. Tell you what though, 1,000 is excessive. If there are more links than text words on the page, something is going on that requires a closer look.

Quantitatively Speaking

Quantitative is much simpler. Utilizing link data from whatever tool you’re using (note: use as many of them as possible and always include Google Webmaster Tools data), apply rules and automatically weed out links that shouldn’t make the cut. Because each site has a different profile, it is better to work on the rule of averages for the links you have. For example, if your average domain authority is 52, start cutting sites below 15 rather than 30. Here are my metric preferences to use:

• * Domain Authority (Open Site Explorer): a link-based score on the predicted strength of a website in the search results.
  * Number of Linking Root Domains (ahrefs, Majestic, Open Site Explorer)
  * Trust Flow (Majestic): a link-based score on the predicted strength of a website’s trustworthiness in the search results.
  * Citation Flow (Majestic): a link-based score on the predicted strength of a website in the search results.
  * Domain Count (Excel): the count of external links coming from a domain.
  * Anchor Text Count (Excel): the count of specific linking keywords.

Other Time Saving Tips

Think at a Domain Level

Typically, if a link on a page stinks, the rest of the domain stinks, and there are hardly any reasons to look at any other pages linking to your site. You should be disavowing at a domain level for almost all of the problem links, so this can save a considerable amount of time.

Remove the Limb to Save the Body

If your website is under a Google link-related penalty, you need to prepare for the worst. Depending on your history, you might have to get rid of nearly every link to prove your worthiness to the powers that be.

Always Be Learnin’

Once you’ve wrapped up discovering as many bad links as you can find, it is time to work on link removal and the disavow file. Link removal is absolutely necessary, if you are working under a Google penalty, so that you can show your work when requesting a review. If your link profile review work is preventive, you can skip to the disavow file and upload proactively. Remember, work as much as you can at the domain level; this is especially true in the disavow file.

These are my go-to favorites when vetting links for their removal and ultimate demise. Have any of your own that you’d like to contribute? I’d love to hear about how you find the bad ilk.

The post How I Know Which of Your Links Are Bad – Link Profile Review Tips appeared first on Portent.

“Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your book. It’s not that way anymore.” – Matt Cutts

It’s hard not to chuckle at least a little bit. These darned marketers ruining the last decent tactic we had around here! Get off my lawn!

Guest blogging devolved because so many people tried to make it scale, but instead of scaling, they ruined the value. Before that infographics were all the rage. Before that it was blog networks and article submission sites. Before that it was directories. You know what? On a small scale and done properly, some of these tactics can be fine if expertly executed. But les Googles has taken it upon themselves to combat the leviathan—marketers attempting to take advantage of their search engine rankings with unsavory tactics.

There is way though because there is a will. Guest blogging is a good tactic when done properly. If you’d like to go forth doing good guest posting, here are easy guidelines to follow:

Don’t only do guest blogging

“If you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice.” – Matt Cutts

Do you see what is missing here? I do! The word “only” isn’t included in the first sentence. You shouldn’t stop guest blogging. Why? Because it’s a great tactic. You need to stop the crappy “guest blogging”—that is, anything that can be more rightly thought of as article marketing—you have been doing for the last few years, however. If your quality has gone down the slippery slope, yes, it is time to take a break from guest posting. But! If you can hold your own with godlike prose on spectacular domains, I think it is okay to continue your path of heavenly content.

One of the most important attributes of guest posting is the same as other link building tactics—you don’t simply rely on one tactic. Why in the name of Larry Page would you do this? Do not put your eggs into a single basket; you will be set up for potential massive failure.

Why not check out these super, rad alternative tactics? Look at the broken links (internal/external), directories, events/sponsorships, internal links, local citations, non-linking mentions, organizations, partnerships, and social profiles! Every single one of these tactics has a caveat so, remember, use in moderation.

There is a plethora of tactics to use that you might not have taken advantage of yet. If you’re having trouble thinking of some, you haven’t seen The Complete List of Link Building Strategies or checked out Brian Dean’s Backlinko blog. If you don’t have the resources, at least create content on your own site and fuel your awesomeness with social and internal links.

When there is too much emphasis on a single link-building tactic, Google will attempt to regulate its potency in the algorithm because people will somehow scale it. There are few tactics left unscathed, but anything that starts scaling on Fiverr will come under fire eventually. While it may be awhile before the reaping begins, you have some time to sow other types of links to avoid any future problems. Please take away that diversity is key, and links are a positive side effect from solid content.

Halt exact match anchor text and author bio footprints!

Don’t be so gaudy with your exact match phrases in that fine content you created. Seriously, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself with your finely tuned anchor text phrases – this will only result in something disastrous. Anchor text has been targeted time and time again by manual penalties and algorithms. Say no to forcing exact match anchor text. You are outdated and will be castigated.

There are three healthy approaches for anchor text: partial (the longest-tail you’ve ever seen) branded phrases, branded, and letting the anchor text fall where it may. When in doubt, you should go with your branded phrase. Anchor text’s purpose is to describe what a reader is going to see when they click, so use your link like a bibliography.

The author bio needs to change every time you post to a new site. If you are guest posting so much that it is a burden to write a new bio, you are guest posting too much. It really should not be a challenge to write your name and some blurbs about your life. The author bio helps establish you as an authority about the post’s topic. If a reader is interested in you, maybe you will end up with some clicks on your blue text.

Nofollow the links if you aren’t sure

2013 was the year of the nofollow. Nofollow is not a catchall solution, but, if you aren’t sure, it’s probably best to utilize it. Whether it passes authority or not (I think it does pass some) is not the highest priority.

Have some standards

Guest posts are great if you are using them to drive traffic, increase brand awareness, and share knowledge. You aren’t going to accomplish those goals when your terribad blog post goes live on what looks like a made for AdSense website.

Use your best judgment when prospecting for opportunities. This has to be on a case-by-case basis, and only you and your friendly search quality reviewer will know whether an external site is a good fit for you. Some generic but acceptable qualifiers that apply to everyone for guest posting are: topically relevant, most of the content is not guest content, and consistent, high-quality content (no grammar mistakes, long form content, content variety).

Win the partnership before asking for gifts

“In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well.” – Matt Cutts

Before you send any more “unsolicited spam email,” your focus should be on finding sites that are not soliciting guest posts. Chances are great that the query you used to scrape the SERPs is being used by at least a couple of other people exploiting the same opportunities. But you know what? The best opportunities will be the ones not advertised. Start at the top by finding the types of content that interest influencers and your traffic.

Need some help with that? Try some really targeted outreach or Buzzsumo? Take a step back from what guest blog posting has become and return to the way it used to be – contributing your top-notch content to high quality sites. The key to take your guest posting to the best form is getting to know influencers well enough so they will vouch for you and post on their site.

Want a second opinion?

If you’d like to read other great opinions on the guest blogging debacle, head over to Jon Cooper’s What To Do After the Guest Blogging Apocalypse post or Jerod Morris’s Matt Cutts Declares Guest Blogging ‘Done’ … Are We All Screwed?. The general consensus is: do more than just guest blogging and focus on quality. You keep those in mind, and you’re as golden as anything Midas ever touched.

The post The Growth and Rise of Good Guest Blogging appeared first on Portent.