Need to do some Link Pruning? Check out these 3 Link Removal Tools!

• We got hit with a dreaded unnatural links notice from Google and have had to start a substantive link pruning campaign. Your suggestions have been great, but we are still having difficulty identifying all questionable links and authorship and contact information on those links. Do you have some tool or service suggestions that may be able to give us a hand?

Answer: Your predicament is not uncommon. As affected site owners and webmasters start digging into a site's backlink profile most are finding it difficult to generate contact or WHOIS info on splogs (spam blogs) and other sites containing nothing other than auto-generated content. And unfortunately, Google has made the standard for link removal pretty high and shooting for 85-90% removal of affected links seems to be a minimal best practice.

Fortunately, as with most needs that arise, there is someone quick to step in and fill it and link pruning tools and services are no exception. If you are having trouble identifying those final links for culling or just need the contact information on existing link targets, there's a tool that can assist you.

Here are our Top Link Removal Tool Recommendations:

1. SEO Gadget Removal Tool
This free tool from UK-based SEO Gadget makes use of the SEOMoz Linkscape API to pull in link metrics, site contact details, and authorship information. You can also expand the tool by exporting links from Google Webmaster Tools and uploading them (200 at a time) for analysis. The tool scores the links individually as "safe" or not.