Do you want your website to appear at the top of search results? If you want to get that sort of result, you’ll need high-quality backlinks. This implies that you should check your backlinks on a regular basis and remove any harmful ones.
Websites with unnatural and suspicious backlinks are frequently penalized by Google and pushed lower in search engine results. As a result, it is critical to remove harmful backlinks from your website’s search authority rankings. In this post, I’ll teach you how to find and remove undesirable backlinks.
What Are Negative Backlinks?
A backlink is a connection between two sites that may be found in your website’s content and links back to another website, website page, or website directory. It’s also a link from another site that leads back to your site. Good backlinks enhance the credibility and authority of a website. Such links aid your SEO campaign by contributing positively to it.
Backlinks from a low-quality website, on the other hand, are referred to as backlinks with a bad backlink. Such links are damaging if the page that connects to your site is unrelated to the material on it.
Now, compared to before, the consequences of undesirable backlinks on a website are more significant. They can harm a website and push it down Google’s last rankings. This is because Google penalizes websites with suspicious links obtained from:
- Footer links
- Site-wide links
- Link networks
- Blogrolls
- Forum profile links and signatures
- Anchor text distribution
- Web directory links
- Article directory links
- Blog comments
How to Identify Bad Backlinks
To identify harmful backlinks, you must assess the domain authority and anchor text of the links.
Domain Authority
The domain authority score indicates the strength of a website’s backlink profile. It is on a scale of 0 to 100. Although domain authority is not used as a ranking factor for Google, it can be useful for comparing your site’s status against those of your competitors. The domain authority represents the number of trusted domains that link to your website. It is common for low-quality backlinks from an obscure source with a low domain authority score
A domain’s authority is determined by measuring the number of pages that link to it. The greater the number of links, the more authoritative a domain is assumed to be. High-quality domains are thought to have a domain authority of greater than 70, whereas low-quality domains have a domain authority lower than 30. Anything outside these ranges is considered average.
However, if your domain authority is less than 30, it does not imply that your website is hazardous. It simply implies that you need to put in more work establishing high-quality connections. Also, don’t be alarmed if someone with a low domain authority links to your site; instead, concentrate on improving the backlinks.
Anchor Text
Ideally, we’d want backlinks to link to our websites from a variety of terms, photos, brand mentions, naked links, and so on. In most situations, this is the case; however, in some situations, these anchors may assist identify undesirable backlinks.
Backlinks from seemingly unrelated websites can lead to a plethora of issues. For example, some backlinks might be linked to your website using an anchor text that has nothing to do with your business. If this is the case, you should look into it to see whether you’ll find spammy backlinks from other websites. Once you detect any variation in the anchor text pointing to your website, it’s time to dwell upon them.
These are not enough to be labeled as harmful backlinks, but they are a good place to start. Google has also discovered certain link strategies that may be problematic for your site’s ranking in search results.
Excessive link exchanges, sponsored backlink creation, the development of unnatural links, and the use of automated systems for link production are examples of unethical methods.
Why Do You Need to Remove Bad Backlinks?
Backlinks are an essential component of your SEO plan. When you obtain a lot of backlinks from various authoritative sources, it indicates that you have been approved by others. This suggests to search engines that other websites consider you a trustworthy source of information. As a result, Google will be able to evaluate whether or not your site should rank highly in search.
Since 2012, the importance of high-quality backlinks has grown considerably. Penguin is used to identify and penalize websites that employ shady link-building methods.
When your site has a lot of bad backlinks, people are going to doubt your credibility. It implies that you’ve adopted the tactic of questionable methods for links. As a result, Google’s spam filter will be alerted, and your website may be penalized. As a consequence, the ranking of your website in search results may deteriorate. Google may consider your website as a source of unsolicited information, and it might even get banned from its index entirely.
In 2016, Google made Penguin a crucial component of its search algorithm. Nowadays, it checks websites in real-time for any form of spam. As a result, business owners must keep removing questionable backlinks continually.
Let’s take a look at the many forms of bad backlinks so that you understand which ones to remove. Before we get into how to eliminate negative backlinks, let’s have a look at the various types of awful backlinks so you know which ones to remove.
Types of Bad Backlinks
The various types of undesirable backlinks are outlined below. While they differ somewhat, each of them is detrimental to your website’s performance and SEO.
Directory Links
Personalize your site by utilizing the keywords and tags that make sense for your industry. This is a quick, free method to create fresh content for your website whenever you want it. Search engines like Google appreciate websites that contain relevant phrases on their homepages because they are more likely to be indexed in search engine results pages (SERPS).
- AlignableBetter Business Bureau
- Yelp
- Chamber of Commerce
- Google My Business
Links that Have Excessively-Optimized Anchor Texts
The clickable text in a link is known as anchor text. If the anchor text in a backlink frequently matches the keywords of a website, it raises Google’s suspicions.
Link Network Links
A link network is made up of connected sites. These are disguised as forums or blogs, but they are designed to deliver a large number of backlinks. When links are identified, Google may devalue them. Any website that depends on such connections will be devalued as well.
Links that Have Excessively-Optimized Anchor Texts
The clickable text in a link is known as anchor text. If the anchor text in a backlink frequently matches the keywords of a website, it raises Google’s suspicions.
Blog Comment Links
It’s critical to keep an eye on your blog page’s comments. If you’ve ever had a blog, you’ve undoubtedly seen spammy comments. These remarks include links that take users to other websites where they try to sell things. Spambots are responsible for deleting the comments. Spambots have become more intelligent over time and thus it is critical to keep an eye on your blog page’s comments.
Comments that are critical of your brand or product will have a negative influence on the profile of your inbound link. It’s a good idea to turn off the option to automatically approve blog comments. Maintaining control over the remarks before they’re posted can help make your website more secure.
You may turn off the comment function if you get a lot of spam comments on your blog. Although allowing comments on your blog is a good thing, it is also difficult. In this situation, you must carefully consider your strategy, but don’t allow comments on your site to be immediately published.
5 Steps for Removing Bad Backlinks
It’s critical to perform a comprehensive backlink audit to find and remove bad backlinks; this is how you can eliminate undesirable backlinks. It might be time-consuming and fatiguing to go through this procedure for thousands of links. Backlinks may be filtered using tools that are accessible based on various criteria.
Here are the procedures you may use to eliminate harmful backlinks:
Gather the backlink data
The first thing you must do to get rid of terrible backlinks is to make a list of the backlinks that are landing on your site from various sources. You may use software like SpyFu’s backlink checker for this. Simply type in your website’s address and press ‘search.’ This will return data on Google-ranked websites that are linking to your page.
You may also use Google Search Console. However, your domain must be linked to Google Analytics for this tool to work. After you’ve linked your website to Google Analytics (if it wasn’t already), go to Google Search Console and choose “Search Traffic,” then “Links to Your Site.”
After clicking on ‘More,’ you will be taken to a page where you must click on ‘more’ (you’ll see it in the section labeled ‘Who links the most’). The last step is to select ‘Download more sample links.’ This will provide you with a spreadsheet of your backlinks.
Find out the bad backlinks
Removing backlinks to boost your search engine rankings is a time-consuming and difficult process. Identifying and removing negative backlinks are critical to improving your SEO performance. In this step, you must review each of the backlinks individually. When checking any of the links, make sure they are relevant to your website’s content.
Although the backlinks you obtain from Google Search Console don’t indicate whether a website is good or bad. However, those acquired from SpyFu provide domain strength information for the webpage that links to you (i.e., the website that links to you). To minimize detrimental backlinks, look for websites with a low domain authority.
Also, look for the website’s name on Google. If your site isn’t indexed by Google, it may be penalized; this can affect your site’s rankings. To search for the website, use “site:domainname” in a search engine like Google.
You can also check the spam score of a website. You may accomplish this by using Link Explorer. To see a website’s spam rating, simply enter its URL into Link Explorer. Any website with a high spam ranking could harm your site’s SEO.
Get rid of the bad backlinks
You need to contact the site owners of the websites that link to your own. The goal is simply to request them to remove the undesirable backlinks without putting yourself in jeopardy. Explain where you want them to delete the backlink. The technique for obtaining owner information via SpyFu’s backlink outreach is straightforward.
Track and monitor your backlinks
It’s not enough to demand that linking websites remove undesirable backlinks; you must also monitor your website’s backlinks to determine whether they have followed through. If a website owner fails to respond within 5–10 days, you may send them a reminder email.
Disavow bad backlinks that are not removed
If some website owners refuse to remove harmful backlinks, you may not get your request fulfilled. In this situation, you have the option of disavowing any links that you don’t wish to be associated with your site.
To accomplish this, you must make a list of links that you want to disavow. You may keep track of the list using an Excel spreadsheet. The next step is to submit your compiled list via the Google Disavow Links tool. When determining whether or not to rank your website in search results, Google will disregard these links.
Wrapping Up
It’s crucial to understand the influence of backlinks on your website (whether good or bad). It’s also a good idea to use this time to clean up any suspicious and artificial backlinks that may be affecting your ability to rank in Google search results.
You must also remember that removing backlinks is likely to cause a dip in the amount of traffic to your website at first. Because you will have lots of new opportunities to acquire high-quality, targeted visitors via ethical means, the loss in traffic will be short-lived.