How to remove bad links

More links means that your website is more trusted by people using the Internet. However, not all links are equal. Your website can be penalized or removed entirely from Google's search engine rankings if it contains too many links of poor quality and suspicious origin. Finding and eliminating these bad links are essential to any rebuilding process.

Removing Bad Links

Once you've either identified or been alerted to the problem of bad links to your websites, you can go about the unpleasant business of planning out the process, pulling together the resources, and then implementing the plan to find the bad links hiding among their not-so-bad counterparts. Once you've accomplished that and have a ready list of bad links placed firmly in your sights, you can then go about getting them removed.

Unfortunately, this is also perhaps the more difficult, time-consuming, and outright aggravating part of the process:

Find the webmaster 

Find the contact information for the webmaster of the website hosting the bad link. You want an email address, a telephone number, and even the physical address under ideal circumstances. Use a database to store this information for ready access if you have a great number of bad links to eliminate.

2)  Contact them using their contact information. Be candid about telling them that their link to your website is causing you to lose search engine ranking and that you'd like them to remove that link. However, keep in mind that you are asking them to do you a favor, which means that your message should be polite and avoid anything that could rile them up. If you have a great number of messages to send, try creating a template that you can refill and reuse at a moment's notice.

3) Be patient because it takes time for people to read and then respond to your messages. However, this does not mean that you should fire off one message and then do nothing more. If you cannot contact them through email, try using their phone numbers and old-fashioned snail mail. Try sending your messages again if you are not getting a response, but first check to see if they've removed the link without bothering to respond.

4) If you are stymied or simply not getting responses to your messages, consider alternate solutions to your problems. Find out who is responsible for setting up the bad link to your website and then contact them for a solution. For example, if the bad links were purchased and paid for, contact the business that was hired to provide them. Similarly, find out the owner of the domain containing the website with the bad link and then contact them.

5) Be sure to document your efforts for mention in your reconsideration petition as a last resort.

Petitioning Google

If you've cleaned out the links to your website and you are still being penalized for having bad links, you can petition Google to reconsider your case. Similarly, if you've picked up a domain that has been previously penalized by Google while under the direction of its former owner, you can petition Google via the same process. Simply sign into Webmaster Tools using your Google account, make sure the website you believe to be wrongly penalized has been added to your list, and then head on over to the reconsideration tool. Of course, some of the same communication rules still apply to the language of your petition. Be polite, never bluster, make no mention of irrelevant matters, and provide good documentation to back up your claims.