Out-sourced link removal.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Tessa Bonacci: Hi Friends, ;
  
  In some need of guidance. I am looking to out source link removal for my site. It is too time consuming to do, we have around 8k links. We did not receive a manual penalty, but were hit by penguin. ;
  
  Any recommendations on which service is legitimate and will take care of the whole process? ;
• 
  Edwin Jonk: +SEMXE ;No touting for business! Your comment has been removed.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: As far as I know there are no automatically services that take care of the whole process. What you can do is hire someone that will look at the link profile. In general, it is hard manual work and sometimes it is not worth it.
  
  Although in theory you could use Google Webmaster Tools to find all the links, it is not that practical. Namely, anchor text can be a problem with regard to Penguin. Therefore you can use other services to find the links with the "spammy" anchor text. Another thing that Penguin looks at is if the links come from a "good neighbourhood". Meaning that if the page and/or the domain that is linking to you is a high quality domain/page. If the domain and the content on the domain look "spammy" mark that. Because in those situations you want to disavow the whole domain.
  
  All the URL's and domains you found during the process can be added to the disavow file:
  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
  
  Let me ping +Tim Capper ;
• 
  SEMXE: hi +Edwin Jonk ;- that wasn't the intention.. as per the query she is asking for some outsourcing help.. that's why we  ;shared the id.. however no issues with the removal. we can understand that. :)  ;
• 
  Tim Capper: Hey +Edwin Jonk ;bit of a toughy because Tessa ;is asking for a recommendation.
  
  Personally I cant actually recommend someone, but you could start with something like link research tools.
  
  Hopefully all of your 8K of links are not bad. As Edwin pointed out you should identify the Bad or unnatural links and add them to your Disavow File
  
  +Tessa Bonacci ;could you provide the URL ( add ( dot) in the url so its not a live link and we could take a look, perhaps its not as bad as you think.
• 
  Jon Tromans: +Tessa Bonacci ;I've seen a few companies say they have cool software to automate the process but I wouldn't touch them as link analysis/removal really needs a human hand.
  
  Somebody needs to go through all these links, figure out what's rubbish and get them removed or disavowed.
  
  It takes a LOT of time.
  
  A few companies I've dealt with have hired someone on a temporary basis & trained them up to just look at links.
  
  Maybe an idea to do this, the extra expense will be worth it in the long run.
• 
  Tony McCreath: If it's Penguin then the main job is disavowing and actual removal is for extra protection.
  
  Sounds like you know how to get backlinks so your job is determining which to disavow and request removals from.
  
  Be careful how penguin tools categories websites for you. Use it as guidance but not as a rule.
  
  CognitiveSEO and rmoov are two tools that have helped me.
• 
  Greg Baka: Ditto what +Tony McCreath ; said. You do not need to remove them, just disavow them. The trick is learning what TYPE of links earned you the penguin downgrade.
  
  I suggest using the penguinanalysis(dot)com tool to learn what type of links you need to find and disavow. That tool will give you a pretty big list of sample links to start with. Once you know what types, you can run tools like Ahrefs, MajesticSEO, and Moz SiteExplorer to get an even bigger list of links and find more of the type that caused your downgrade.
  
  Here is info about how the PenguinAnalysis tool works: http://moz.com/blog/its-penguin-hunting-season-how-to-be-the-predator-not-the-prey