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Google will not penalize you for removing links, although your rankings may drop if you remove links that are helping you rank.

But keep in mind that links that are helping you rank today, could end up causing a penalty tomorrow. If your links are spammy, Google will eventually catch up, it's just a question of when. To be safe, you should remove blatantly spammy links.

Keep in mind that there are hundreds of ranking signals. Just because Moz is reporting that your PA/DA is better than the competition does't mean you _should _be outranking them.

Some traits of bad links:

• The link's anchor text exactly matches your target keywords (eg. "Miami Auto Repair Shop")
• The link is on a website that is unrelated to yours and likely has little traffic/readership
• You paid to have the link placed
• You "submitted" an article to get the link posted
• You control the site that the link is on
• The link is in a link farm/directory (a site/page with a bunch of links that are intended only to impact SEO)

Hope this helps! I'm happy to give you my input on specific examples if you have them.

You can certainly SEO a website that doesn't use a CMS.

The important question is, given the nature of the site, the budget and goals of the client, and the resources you have to work with, is a hard coded HTML website the most practical solution?

Content management systems like WordPress, Drual, and HubSpot exist to make it easy to build and manage a website. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of individuals and businesses who need a website do not have extensive technical resources to be able to create and maintain a complex, highly-customized website.

I'd be willing to bet that your client fits this bill, which means you can probably help stretch their marketing budget further by using a CMS to make your job easier.

Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends".

I do have some recent experience with this for 2 very small sites (one has around 300 indexed URL, the other has around 70), which you may find useful.

In each case, it took just a day or two to get the most important URLs (best rankings, traffic, link authority, etc.) swapped in for their non-https counterparts. However, deeper URLs with little link authority took up to 90 days to be swapped out.

If your most important URLs don't get swapped out in a week or so, I would check these things:

• Make sure you've updated internal links so that they point to the https URLs. You don't want to pass your link authority through 301s anyways.
• Make sure all versions of the site are verified in GWT, setting the https version as the preferred version.
• Make sure your sitemaps (XML and HTML) contain the https versions of your URLs
• Make sure that the https URLs do not have the non-https URL's set as the canonical version.

Hope this helps and good luck!

You can certainly SEO a website that doesn't use a CMS.

The important question is, given the nature of the site, the budget and goals of the client, and the resources you have to work with, is a hard coded HTML website the most practical solution?

Content management systems like WordPress, Drual, and HubSpot exist to make it easy to build and manage a website. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of individuals and businesses who need a website do not have extensive technical resources to be able to create and maintain a complex, highly-customized website.

I'd be willing to bet that your client fits this bill, which means you can probably help stretch their marketing budget further by using a CMS to make your job easier.

Google will not penalize you for removing links, although your rankings may drop if you remove links that are helping you rank.

But keep in mind that links that are helping you rank today, could end up causing a penalty tomorrow. If your links are spammy, Google will eventually catch up, it's just a question of when. To be safe, you should remove blatantly spammy links.

Keep in mind that there are hundreds of ranking signals. Just because Moz is reporting that your PA/DA is better than the competition does't mean you _should _be outranking them.

Some traits of bad links:

• The link's anchor text exactly matches your target keywords (eg. "Miami Auto Repair Shop")
• The link is on a website that is unrelated to yours and likely has little traffic/readership
• You paid to have the link placed
• You "submitted" an article to get the link posted
• You control the site that the link is on
• The link is in a link farm/directory (a site/page with a bunch of links that are intended only to impact SEO)

Hope this helps! I'm happy to give you my input on specific examples if you have them.

Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends".

I do have some recent experience with this for 2 very small sites (one has around 300 indexed URL, the other has around 70), which you may find useful.

In each case, it took just a day or two to get the most important URLs (best rankings, traffic, link authority, etc.) swapped in for their non-https counterparts. However, deeper URLs with little link authority took up to 90 days to be swapped out.

If your most important URLs don't get swapped out in a week or so, I would check these things:

• Make sure you've updated internal links so that they point to the https URLs. You don't want to pass your link authority through 301s anyways.
• Make sure all versions of the site are verified in GWT, setting the https version as the preferred version.
• Make sure your sitemaps (XML and HTML) contain the https versions of your URLs
• Make sure that the https URLs do not have the non-https URL's set as the canonical version.

Hope this helps and good luck!