Removing suspicious or poor-quality backlinks can help when a manual penalty has been imposed by Google's spam team. While it is possible to try building strong and trustworthy backlinks to counteract the Google penalty, this only makes sense as an SEO measure
in the medium and long term if suspicious or harmful links are identified and removed at the same time, or reported to Google using the Disavow Tool, so that the penalty can be lifted. But how do you find harmful backlinks? Here is the process of removing links in response to a manual Google penalty in 3 steps:
1) Identify potentially suspicious backlinks: If the number of backlinks is small, simply reviewing the individual pages using basic tools such as SEOquake is sufficient. For larger numbers, you should make use of the metrics provided by analysis tools, such as those offered by the Link Detox Tool (www.linkresearchtools.com).
2) Manual backlink analysis: Once the list of potentially suspicious backlinks is available, the most difficult and time-consuming part of the link removal process begins. Each individual link should be examined closely and analyzed according to the case category specified by the analysis tool (case categories include, for example, "not in the Google index" or "poor ranking for page title").
3) Link removal or link disavowal: The identified backlinks should now be removed step by step or added to the Disavow Tool, which has been offered by Google since October 2012. Finally: After each stage of the link removal process or after each update of the disavow list, you should of course submit a request for a review of the affected website.
