Backlinks from poor sites

Benzino

Hey all, new to this scene, so this could be a silly question

I'm gonna be doing some SEO work on a site in the coming weeks. I have access to some software which finds all the backlinks to the site I'm gonna be working on.

Anyway, after checking out some of the sites linking to ours (over 1600), allot of them appear to be poor and I would imagine Google would rank them poorly too (I'll have more software available to me soon which will tell me the rank of each site linking to us). Some sites are in Polish (we are an Irish site) and some just consist of links and no content at all. Most are in no way relevant to us content-wise either.

Now I think having "bad" sites link to us reflects poorly on us and in turn damages our rank rather than improving it, is this the case?

If so, I plan on trying to get these links removed, is there anyway to force a website to remove a link other than constantly emailing them?

Feel free to virtually slap me if any the above is nonsense

andywozhere

I think you are more or less right. I'm guessing someone might have been a bit over zealous submitting your site to irrelevant and possibly spammy directories. I'd a similar problem when I submitted my site to a search engine/directory and ended up with loads of irrelevant and spammy links.

Where possible I'd ask for your site to be removed. That said you can't really prevent good or bad sites linking to your own site so I wouldn't worry about it too much and concentrate on good relevant links and good content. The more good links you have the less relevant the bad links will be.

Billz

Just in the same way google keeps an eye out for people clicking on your adwords ads and running up your bills, Im sure they make some allowances for the possibility of someone doing some black hat / questionable SEO on your site.

Im sure they use the presence of this in conjunction with something else to make their decision

I really don't think this makes a difference.

If so, surely competitors would be adding links to the poorest, scummiest places on the internet to ruin their reputation. Poor links do not decrease value afaik, they just don't add much either.