The links you build off-site are the heart of your off-site SEO strategy. Therefore, every white hat specialist should maintain a healthy habit of cleaning up suspicious and “unnatural” backlinks. Making your website stand out is crucial. Consider the long-term success of the company and its SEO ranking.
Despite using white hat SEO practices for your entire career, a sudden influx of spam links can ruin your business and your website. Can you deal with negative SEO and get rid of bad backlinks? Fortunately, there is. Here’s how to check and remove toxic backlinks and more.
What Are Toxic Backlinks?
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A toxic backlink is a link from a spammy or low-quality website. There is a risk of these links doing more harm than good. Search engines like Google can get the impression that your website is also spammy or low-quality when you use them. It is how Google penalizes websites with excessively toxic links.
When a backlink comes from any of the following sources, you can consider it a toxic link;
- Google penalized sites
- Sites with adult content
- Sites with illegal content
- Spam-filled blog directories
- Websites that generate links automatically
A bad backlink comes from an “unnatural” and “irrelevant” source that adds no real value to your website. You can lose search engine rankings if you have such backlinks.
How Does Removing Bad Backlinks Help?
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SEO relies heavily on backlinks. A backlink from several authoritative websites confirms your website’s authority. Search engines use it to determine whether you are a trustworthy source of information. It helps them decide whether your website deserves a high ranking.
Google Penguin, introduced in 2012, has made backlink quality even more important. Penguin’s main objective is to identify and penalize websites that engage in questionable link-building practices. Toxic backlinks raise questions about the credibility of your website. Your link acquisition process appears to have been unnatural or suspicious.
Due to this, Google may penalize your website if it triggers its spam filter. There is a high chance that your website will drastically fall down the search engine rankings and may even be banned altogether from Google. If bad backlinks are coming to your website, it is crucial to remove them.
Penguin became part of Google’s core search algorithm in 2016. Now it monitors real-time websites to detect spam. Consequently, website owners must regularly remove spammy backlinks from their websites. With a tool from outreachcrayon.com that checks toxic links, the first step to eliminating them is understanding the links mentioned above.
How Do You Find Toxic Backlinks?
Searching for toxic backlinks should be an ongoing part of every web administrator’s or SEO professional’s search engine optimization strategy. You should do an audit at your earliest convenience if you’ve noticed a steep decline in web traffic.
Many web admins, however, prefer to do them regularly to spot potential issues before they impact ranking. Here’s how they do it:
- Retrieving the original data — Create an audit, set your desired parameters, and select your favorite. Once your search criteria are specified, the tool will look for existing backlinks that meet them.
- Assess each toxic backlink — A link audit tool will identify potentially harmful links and sort them accordingly. Identify and review the entries in the list that impact your site the most.
- Address links with high toxicity ratings — You might also see listings that you know are legitimate or have a low toxicity score. Add these links to a safelist to help separate them from everything else.
- How to Remove Toxic Backlinks
- Once the scanning is complete, you will have a list of infringing backlinks. How do we proceed? The obvious solution is to get rid of them.
- Delete them manually — Editing the content of those websites’ content will make targeting their backlinks easier
- Get someone to remove them — Several factors can cause this method to fail. Perhaps there isn’t a “contact me” tab, or maybe the person isn’t attentive or doesn’t care. However, if it works, you’re in business.
- Disavow the backlinks — You can request Google to exclude these unwanted backlinks from your link profile. You can identify toxic Pages in two ways: through Google Search Console or by using a tool.
How Can You Avoid Toxic Backlinks Moving Forward?
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After removing any toxic links from your site, making sure they don’t reappear is essential. The following tips will help you.
- Stay away from paying for backlinks.
- Avoid anchor texts with exact matches.
- Avoid adding backlinks to comments
- Audit backlinks regularly
Besides maintaining a clean link-building strategy, regular link auditing is one of the best ways to avoid toxic backlinks. By doing this, you can identify and address problematic links before they damage your business. Do a quick audit every two months for the best results. You may have the option to automate this in your audit tool, so make use of it.
Conclusion
An inbound link profile plays an essential role in the search engine rankings of your website. Identifying and removing bad backlinks is critical to prevent your website from getting penalized. An annual backlink audit is the best way to detect toxic backlinks and take the necessary measures to remove them. The use of tools can be helpful in filtering and removing spammy and low-quality backlinks.
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