Bad backlinks can affect your website’s rankings and bring negative SEO to your website. Typically, bad backlinks will come from spammy websites, websites with poor backlink profiles, sites that have been penalized, sites that have been compromised, PBNs, blog comments, spam links, and other links of that nature. Basically, these are links from any site that is poor quality and not trustworthy in Google’s eyes, which is why it is not going to do you any favors pointing to your website. You must regularly assess the website’s content, user experience, and domain name. With regular backlink audits, you can identify and remove toxic backlinks to maintain a great SEO profile.
Bad Backlinks – Why You Need to Worry
As a website owner, you should know that your backlink profile might have bad backlinks that could be working against you. Today, backlinks are one of the top ranking factors for Google, but they are not all rainbows and butterflies. Some backlinks are simply bad and toxic. This aspect highlights the importance of identifying bad backlinks if they are harming your SERP rankings. You should also know what you can do about bad backlinks, as these are bad apples in your website’s basket.
These bad backlinks essentially come from dodgy sources that make your website look bad in the eyes of Google. Bad backlinks will make Google think that you are trying to cheat the system or scam your users, which is why you need to educate yourself on bad backlinks and how you can find them.
What Are the Problems of Bad Backlinks?
Bad backlinks can cause several problems, such as the following:
- You can get penalized by Google.
- Your website’s reputation can get damaged.
- Your search engine rankings might drop.
- You might be wasting your resources.
Identify the Types of Bad Backlinks
First, you need to identify bad backlinks and their various types to avoid their bad effects.
Spammy and Irrelevant Backlinks
Spammy and irrelevant backlinks are types of bad backlinks that you need to be mindful of. Spammy and irrelevant backlinks come from websites that are unrelated to your website niche. The presence of these bad backlinks signals to Google that your website lacks credibility and authority.
What happens next is that Google loses trust in you, and the user experience goes down. You can expect a bad backlinks penalty by Google, which will further push your website down the SERPs.
Paid Backlinks
When it comes to bad backlinks, you should see paid links as trouble. Ideally, you shouldn’t pay any website to give you a backlink. The links might come from a website that is relevant to your website’s content, but if it is not marked as sponsored and if it is not a no-follow link and Google finds out, your website might be in trouble.
You simply cannot manipulate the search engine rankings like that. Also, you should know that the penguin update devalues these links, and any other that Google speculates is paid.
Link networks, PBNs, link farms, or whatever you want to call these links, are all strategies created to manipulate search engine rankings. For instance, link networks are essentially interconnected websites that exchange links. PBNs are private websites that are created to host backlinks. On the other hand, link farms are larger collections of websites to generate links. Google sees this as hanging out with bad companies, and if you hang out with cheaters, Google will believe that you are one of them.
So, if you have paid links, such as PBNs, link farms, and link networks in your backlink profile, then you shouldn’t act surprised if your website disappears from the search results.
Negative SEO Also Generates Bad Backlinks
Sometimes, you can get bad backlinks without you even knowing it. Maybe some bots or hackers left spam comments with your links on shady websites. It could also be that your SEO team tried to get cheap and fast links from low-quality sources, such as directories or link farms. It could also be that someone is trying to sabotage you, which is also known as negative SEO. Negative SEO happens when your competitors create or redirect bad backlinks to your website on purpose.
They can potentially use automated tools to spam your links on harmful or irrelevant websites, which is indeed a dirty trick.
Low-Quality Directory Backlinks
A web directory comprises a list of similar businesses from the same industry, such as beauty service providers in Germany. Business profiles in directories that aren’t created by an editor or that are untrustworthy and have little to no traffic can harm the SEO of your website. These low-quality directories can cause Google penalties and also waste your time and money.
Local directory backlinks are bad for your website as these don’t help improve your website’s rankings. These low-quality directories are also linked with spammy sites and can cause penalties. You should avoid low-quality directory backlinks altogether, as these waste your time and money without giving you any real benefit.
Old Backlinks Can Turn Bad
Have you ever wondered about the old backlinks that you used to have from websites that were sold or changed? These are backlinks that don’t just go away, which means that they might still be pointing back to your website – and not in a good way. This aspect indicates why you need to monitor your backlink profile and make sure that it matches your current status and relevance.
It is incredibly important to know that you have a good website. Other websites might be giving you a backlink for their own gain.
Link Exchanges Are Toxic Too
Reciprocal linking can damage your website’s reputation, too. Essentially, link exchange is an agreement that happens between two websites where they link to each other’s site. Now, link exchange might seem like a harmless means to get more backlinks, but it can also be considered a manipulative SEO tactic. According to Google’s spam policy, excessive link exchanges are considered spammy links and can land you a penalty.
How to Find Bad Backlinks?
There is some detective work that you can do to find bad backlinks. You should be able to spot harmful backlinks and maintain a healthy backlink profile, which is a crucial step towards protecting your website’s SEO.
Let us check out some of the options that will help you identify bad backlinks.
The Manual Approach of Identifying Bad Backlinks
This approach is performed manually, which is why it is time-consuming. It involved the examination of each of the backlinks that are pointing to your website. You need to open GSC, which stands for Google Search Console.
From there, you must navigate to the left-side menu and go to “links.” From there, select “More” in the section of the “Top linking sites.”
You will get a list of all the backlinks to your site. When you zoom in on a site, you will also see a list of your web pages that are receiving backlinks. You can click on any target page to assess the external page that is linking to your content.
What you want to do is assess each of the linking sites to inspect their overall quality. While you are at it, watch out for the following flags:
- Low website authority
- Spammy content
- Keyword stuffing
- AI-generated content
- Excessive ads and CTA
- Irrelevant sites
- Absence of contact information
- 404 errors
You should also look out for websites that are evidently outdated, as outdated websites are seen as less trustworthy by Google and its users.
Use a Tool to Identify Bad Backlinks
Understandably, the entire process of manually checking each one of the backlinks can be overwhelming. This is where the importance of a backlink checker tool comes in. You might want to use the backlink audit tool by Semrush and find bad backlinks.
If this is your first time using the backlink checker tool, you can sign up for free and use the 14-day trial. Open the backlink audit tool and proceed to enter your website domain. Choose the option “Start Backlink Audit.” This audit might take a few minutes – however – the duration also depends on your backlink profile and the number of backlinks pointing to your website.
After the completion of the audit, you will get an overview of the bad backlinks that Semrush will categorize as the following:
Toxic: These links are marked red, and their toxicity score is usually between sixty and one hundred.
Potentially Toxic: These links are marked orange, and their toxicity score is between forty-five and fifty-nine.
Non-Toxic: These links are marked green, which means these are high-quality backlinks. Their toxicity score is between zero and forty-four.
How to Remove Bad Backlinks from Google?
There are a couple of things that you can do to remove bad backlinks from Google:
Request Webmasters to Remove Bad Backlinks
If you have fallen prey to bad backlinks, you need to disavow them. You should start with identifying the toxic backlinks that you don’t want in your backlink profile. Proceed to reach out to the host webmaster and politely inform them how this backlink is hurting your website and theirs as well.
A smart webmaster should understand what they are risking and will remove the backlink. However, if this doesn’t happen, there is definitely more that you can do. For instance, you can involve Google.
Use the Google Disavowal Tool
To disavow bad backlinks, you can use the Google disavowal tool. According to Google, there are two main reasons why you might want to use this tool. The first reason is that a website has a lot of spammy, irrelevant, or low-quality links pointing to it. These can be links from shady sites that promise free money, among other things.
These toxic backlinks might have gotten you into trouble with Google. Or, they might get you into trouble soon, and you already know that you don’t want to be in the bad books of Google, as it has the power to make your website disappear.
To use the Google disavowal tool, you need to assemble all the links that you want to disavow in a text file. Make sure that all URLs are in a separate line. Using this Google tool, you can also disavow a domain. Just make sure to follow the formatting. When using the Google Disavow tool, Google will give you a warning, which is why you need to be one hundred percent sure and move forward with uploading your file.
Final Thoughts: Keep Your Backlink Profile Healthy
Now that you know how bad backlinks can affect the health of your website, you need to understand the importance of having a healthy backlink profile to boost your website rankings. You should start by understanding the common sources of bad backlinks. Once you do this, you will be able to avoid attracting bad backlinks to your backlink profile.
It is important to mention here that you don’t always have complete control over the backlinks you get, which means that you can still get spammy links. However, if you focus on strategically building high-quality backlinks, you can boost your website’s credibility. You can leverage the link-building services from a well-reputed link-building agency like ours and save time and effort while boosting your search engine rankings and your website’s reputation.
FAQs
What are bad links in SEO?
Bad links in SEO can hurt your Google rankings. The best thing you can do is to use a backlink checker to identify bad backlinks and disavow them altogether to keep your website safe.
Can you fix bad backlinks?
Generally, there are two ways to fix bad backlinks. You can request that the webmaster remove the links. You can use the Google Disavowal Tool to disavow bad backlinks and maintain a healthy backlink profile.
How do you get high-quality backlinks?
You can do several things to get high-quality backlinks, such as HARO link-building. You can publish high-quality skyscraper content that other sources would like to link to.
