Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 01:56 pm

Following recent Google updates (specifically the Penguin update that was aimed at poor quality links) there seems to be a lot of SEO firms opening up that say they specialise in getting poor quality links removed if your site has been hit by the Penquin update.

The problem is that many of these firms don’t seem to know what a poor quality link is.  Take the example of a directory that lists UK business related sites and adds no-follow to the links.  Now then, some people might see a link in a directory and think that it’s a low quality link that needs to be removed and so send the webmaster of the directory a email asking for removal of the link – or even threatening penalties if the link is not removed.

What these people don’t seem to realise is that as you will see in this conversation by John Mu, a Google employee,  ” having links (even a large number of them) with rel=nofollow pointing to your site does not negatively affect your site. We take these links out of our PageRank calculations, and out of our algorithms when they use links. “,  this means that a no-follow link can not affect your rankings. In fact there is a suspicion amongst professional SEO people that every site needs a few no-follow links in order to make the link profile look natural – this goes against the idea propounded by many “link builders” that they will only ever look for links that they call “do-follow” and ignore no-follow ones.

If you stop to think about it for a moment, what are you trying to achieve with links to your site?

• Are you trying to boost your site’s rankings in the search engines?  Something that is against the Google guidelines http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 says “Any links intended to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme.“, which if that’s the reason why you are trying to get links is definitely frowned upon.
•  Or, are you getting links from other sites so that people will follow them to your site ?  If this is the case it doesn’t matter whether the link is a “do-follow” or a “no-follow”, the visitor doesn’t see the difference and if the link is relevant to them the chances are they will follow it anyway.

So, to sum up – before you spend days looking for bad quality links that you have been told by “experts” that you need to follow, actually take a little bit of time looking at the links themselves and seeing if they are really affecting your rankings.

Oh, and there are many SEO professionals out there that don’t bother getting rid of poor quality links (something that is difficult to do) but concentrate on getting good quality ones for clients – maybe you need to look at this kind of service instead thus actually spending money on a service that will be of benefit to you.