Best tool or service to identify toxic backlinks

I use Wordfence for security on WordPress and it checks against Google's bad url list and alerts if it finds any.

I think he is referring to bad links that will hurt you in the SERPs. Not something that protects you from hackers or etc.

If your talking about that. Then I would manually do this, really I don't know of any good programs that do this. Use Majestic SEO to find your links. There is link detox, but I didn't think it was that great of a program. It's new, so they have some bugs to work out.

My agency uses tools.cognitiveseo.com, which pulls from Ahrefs, Majestic, and OSE and labels links as unnatural. It's quite awesome but still buggy.

Also I just saw this today on twitter, http://www.penguinanalysis.com/, might be worth a shot.

If my clients would use link detox or anything like that they would lose all their rankings.

Sure my links might not be the most natural ones, can't disagree really as we buy expired domains and re-purpose them completely.

But they ARE responsible for the rankings, without them my clients would have never ranked so well based on their existing "natural" but oh so weak links.

Lately I had a company that we build links for quite some time ago. They lost a few positions for their main keyword causing them to drop a few positions to the 2nd page and suspected my links to be the cause (totally ignoring the fact that back then most of the links rolled off and thus naturally lost strength).

Instead of buying new ones they send me link removal request after link removal request, okay if that's what you want. In the end they didn't rank at all anymore.

When they started with all the link removals they ranked at #12, now they rank at #45, go figure.

Wordfence is best for wordpress.

You can use SEO Quake for firefox. There are indicators there that will somehow tell you if the site is a good site to put backlinks to. I would also suggest you use a backlink finder like Traffic Travis. You can enter your competitor's site to get its backlinks then just check them manually using SEO Quake

Here are some tools worth looking at..