Will Removing Crappy Links Help Me?

I’m working on a long overdue revamp for one of my sites – actually, I’ve been working on this revamp for absolutely ages but I keep allowing myself to be sidetracked onto other stuff. The site is about four years old and it includes a couple of links pages. Bog-standard (on-topic) reciprocal links pages that I’d built in the hope of improving my search rankings in Google and the rest. I suspect it never did make a blind bit of difference really! Well it might have helped page rank I suppose.

I’ve just spent an hour following these links. All of the sites still exist so I’m not linking to non-existent pages. A couple seem to be now offering cheap hosting deals or that highly relevant mix of mortgages and ringtone downloads. Most have either deleted their reciprocal link back to be me or buried their links/resources page where it’ll never be found anyway. Some sites that I recall having page ranks of 5 or 6 are now zero. So, with the exception of one or two, I’ve removed all these crappy outbound links from my site and I’ll wait and see if it has any positive impact. I can’t see it being detrimental at all anyways.

Search Marketing Reciprocal Linking