A Look Into Toxic Backlinks and How They Can Affect Your Site

Backlinks are an essential part of any SEO strategy. Beyond helping your website rank higher, backlinks:

Represent a vote of confidence from other websites.

Tell search engines that you are a reliable and trustworthy source of information.

Set the foundation you need to establish yourself as a reputable website.

By this logic, it would be fair to say that having a large number of backlinks to your website is a positive thing. You could conclude that the higher the number of backlinks, the better your standing within search engines.

What you must realize is that, unfortunately, this is not necessarily true.

This is not to say that backlinks aren’t good, or that link building doesn’t work. Quite the opposite. A link building survey found that SEO professionals use a variety of link building methods in their work.

Link building is still a tried-and-true SEO strategy.

What also must be noted here is that the quality of backlinks also matters. Not all backlinks are good, as many of them can cause a lot of damage to the infrastructure of your website.

It’s these toxic backlinks that you need to watch out for.

Learning about toxic backlinks can be the difference between a website that ranks high, and one that gets penalized.

What are Toxic Backlinks?

Toxic backlinks are backlinks that come from spammy, disingenuous, or low-quality websites. These websites might link off to yours to harm your website search rankings.

Without regular check-ups, these toxic backlinks can cause significant damage.

You might also get toxic links as part of a faulty link building strategy, where you accept links from any kind of website for the sake of increasing your backlinks. These strategies are penalized by Google, as they encourage websites to focus on the user, not the search engine.

In essence, Google expects websites to earn their backlinks through the quality of its content.

This is why toxic backlinks can cause a lot of damage to the websites they link to. They go against Google’s guidelines and increase the chances of your website getting ranked much lower.

Learning to identify toxic backlinks, is therefore crucial to the success of your website.

How to Spot a Toxic Backlink

A good backlink comes naturally, from a trusted source. They are the payoff of creating high-quality content that other websites genuinely want to share.

A toxic backlink, on the other hand, comes from an untrustworthy, sometimes un-indexed website.

These are the type of websites you need to watch out for:

• Spam websites.
• Link networks.
• Websites created with the sole purpose of link building.
• Websites that are not indexed by Google or any other search engine.
• Websites with viruses or malware.

Always be on the lookout for these types of websites. The backlinks they offer might seem beneficial, but they can cause a lot of damage to the health of your website.

What Can You Do About Toxic Backlinks?

If you suspect your website might contain backlinks, you need to act immediately. Follow this simple process to monitor, spot, and remove toxic backlinks from your website:

Analyze Your Website’s Backlinks Regularly.

To begin the process of spotting and removing toxic backlinks from your website, you must first choose a backlink analysis tool.

This kind of tool is offered by many companies, though one of the most popular is SEMrush’s backlink audit tool. This will help you understand the kind of websites that link off to yours, giving you a chance to remove them. You should follow this process regularly to ensure the health of your website.

Remove Toxic Backlinks from Your Website

You must remove backlinks as soon as you spot them. This is why continuous monitoring is necessary.

Once you catch the toxic backlink, there are several steps you can take to get it removed.

The first and most simple way to remove a toxic backlink is to contact the website owner and ask them to remove the backlink.

If their contact information is available, you can send them a simple request such as this:

They might ignore your request, but if they don’t, you save yourself the trouble of having to remove them yourself.

Another way is to explore the removal features of backlink analysis tools like the one previously mentioned. If this is not an option, you can always disavow the toxic backlinks directly with Google.

Google has a tool for disavowing links. You should make use of this tool when you’ve exhausted all other alternatives.

Remember that using this tool incorrectly can negatively impact your search rankings.

Develop a Backlinking Strategy for Your Website

Once you’ve removed or disavowed toxic backlinks from your website, it’s time to prepare a better backlinking strategy. For your strategy to work, however, it needs to be 100% compliant with Google’s guidelines.

How do you accomplish this? High-quality content.

The best way to earn more high-quality backlinks that help your website rank higher is through your website’s content. The more value you provide your visitors, the more established you become within your niche.

Always make sure your content is concise and easy to understand. Most of all, make sure your content is relevant to your audience.

A Quick Word on Backlinks

The world of search engine optimization is always evolving. This makes it crucial for any business to stay up-to-date on SEO and Google PageRank best practices.

This will help you get a better understanding of what you need to do to ensure the success and growth of your business.

In some cases, you’d also be guest blogging on other sites. It’s easy to get tempted with sites that easily accept guest posts even without checking the quality of your article. To avoid this, it’s best to hire professionals such as Linkdoctor blogger outreach services. They’ll be in charge of looking for relevant and niche-related sites to guest post for you. In this way, the chances of you getting toxic backlinks will decrease.

Backlinks are one of the most important factors of SEO, simply because it determines how search engines view you. To stay on the good side of search engines, you need to develop a backlink strategy that centers around quality as opposed to quantity.