How to find bad links affecting your local ranking

[Michael Usov]

Hey was wondering if people could share how the find bad links.

I have a new client who really needs local seo but someone has be creating a lot of links ( not citations ) thinking that it would help. I'm a bit suspicious of what they have done and would like to check if there are any links from bad neighbourhoods and what the anchor text variation is like and just general check to see what I'm in for.

I've looked around and saw 'link detox' but haven't tried it , can anyone recommend whats best for this.

 

[Dustybones]

I usually use multiple sources to cross check. I use the following tools:

1. Google / Bing Webmaster tools
2. ahrefs.com
3. majesticseo.com/reports/neighbourhood-checker

 

[PaulSh]

I don't believe that any software piece can correctly identify "bad backlinks". You'd still need some expertise to tell which backlinks are bad.
What I do, for example, is I important my Google Webmaster Tools backlinks into SEO Spyglass http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/ and analyze them there.

 

[chrish]

I would run a link DTOX report, which is one of the tools available on LinkResearchTools.com - it's pretty good at categorizing links & assigning them a 'risk level'. Of course, there is some manual review involved but this is the best tool I've found. They have their own database that pulls from 22 sources (including OSE), you can also import spreadsheets from other tools such as GWT. Hope this helps!

Link Detox Tool (DTOX) ? Link Research Tools

 

[Laustin1878]

IIRC, I thought Google cannot penalize you for "inbound links" from bad neighborhoods, unless something changed recently? These links can be devalued as they have no correlation to your industry but you should not be penalized for links from these types of sites. I know the Google algo updates go after low quality, poor relevancy links as well as anchor text heavy links but from bad neighborhoods?

There would likely be a penalty if you were linking out to these bad neighborhoods from the site but typically not in. If placing a link in a bad neighborhood would hurt a site, don't you think every competitor would try to do this and sabotage their competition?

Am I not understanding the question properly?