Good things come from bad things but there is nothing good that can come out of toxic backlinks.
They are like leeches slowly eating away all the SEO efforts off your website.
One single toxic backlink might be harmless but a good number of them is a threat to your website.
As a website owner, it is your duty to identify such backlinks and prevent further damage.
As it is, backlinks are generated from other websites without your knowledge meaning you'll need to regularly examine your website.
It's a lot of work. I know. But who said owning a website is easy? Besides the ROI a great website can generate is worth all the trouble.
So, what are these "website leeches" that you need to look out for and how do you get rid of them?
Let's explore.
What are Toxic Backlinks?
Toxic backlinks are any low quality backlinks generated to your website in an unnatural way.
High quality backlinks are generated to your website naturally from other websites that deemed your content helpful and valuable.
Where Do Toxic Backlinks Come From?
Of course backlinks are generated to your website silently meaning there's no notification you'll receive when someone else links to you but that doesn't mean they have no origin.
Toxic backlinks can appear from three different sources.
- Other unknown websites.
- Paid websites by you.
- Competitors out to get you.
Examples of toxic backlinks to watch out for:
- Spamming blog comments - commenting on blogposts that are unrelated to your niche in hopes of driving traffic to your website.
- Private Blog Networks (PBNs) - websites created for the purpose of generating backlinks.
- Suspicious websites - sites such as adult sites, gambling sites etc.
- Paid Schemes - networks that exchange money for links.
- Unrelated websites - sites that are outside your niche.
Accepting backlinks from such sources might lead to severe consequences from Google. That’s because they now have strict rules against such manipulative tactics that violate its guidelines.
In the best case scenario Google can ignore such toxic backlinks on your website, other times they'll penalize you but in severe cases your website can be terminated.
Let’s look at the two types of Google penalties.
An Algorithmic penalty is hardly as severe as a manual penalty. It only occurs when google updates its algorithm and they happen to cut across the previous ones. Meaning what was normal before the update could be a violation afterwards and the other way around.
A manual penalty on the other hand, comes as a result of frequent violation of Google's guidelines. Such as use of black hat SEO tactics that work to manipulate search engines. Toxic backlinks are forms of these tactics.
Google, through its team of experts, sends a manual penalty to your website as punishment. As this happens, Google will lower your websites rank on SERPs and reduce organic traffic to it.
How toxic backlinks affect your SEO Performance
Optimizing your website for search engines using the right tactics is a long and tedious process.
It requires patience and a lot of effort. And to top it off Google's algorithm keeps changing and meaning you'll have to adjust to them or risk falling behind.
In that exhausting process of trying to make it, comes toxic backlinks that pose a threat to all your websites progress.
Once Google detects bad backlinks on your website and issue a penalty, your website will lose its credibility, high rank on search engines, and organic traffic. This will reduce your website's SEO performance to zero.
What to do to improve it
The impact of a huge number of toxic backlinks can be great but that doesn't mean that it's the end for you.
You can make a quick turn around using effective strategies to improve your website's SEO performance regardless of the damage suffered.
It might take some time but it's not impossible.
Here's a few things you can do to bounce back:
- Identify toxic backlinks on your website.
- Filter out and remove bad backlinks on your website.
- Create quality content that will earn you high quality backlinks.
- Avoid purchasing backlinks.
- Avoid commenting on Blogposts unrelated to your website's niche.
How To Find Toxic Backlinks For Free?
Before you even think of how to remove toxic links from your website, how do you find them?
Backlinks generated on your website gather without consent. It's likely that a toxic backlink might sneak up on you until it's too late.
To prevent that from happening, there are different ways you can use to identify bad backlinks.
One is through a manual inspection where you go through each backlink one by one clicking on them and determine whether they are toxic backlinks or good backlinks.
This method is time consuming and hectic to say the least but it can get you the results you desire.
The other way is through the use of free backlink audit tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush.
They'll help you find any toxic backlinks among good backlinks on your website.
You can then create a list for them that you'll use to get rid of the bad backlinks.
How Do You Check Toxic Links On a Website?
The easiest and most effective way to check bad backlinks on your website is by using tools such as SEMrush toxic link checker.
SEMrush will provide you with all the backlinks on your website and review toxic backlinks, potentially toxic backlinks and non-toxic backlinks.
This will help you take necessary measures to avoid penalties from search engines such as Google or in the case of a penalty, get rid of the toxic backlinks to avoid further damage.
Another thing a spammy backlink checker such as SEMrush can do is recrawl your backlink profile regularly to look out for any new links that may appear.
This will help you identify bad backlinks and how severely infested your website is.
The toxic score checker in the SEMrush tool is a feature that gives you an overview of your backlink profile with a toxicity score that ranges from 0-100.
That’s cool, right?
How To Remove Toxic Backlinks?
Toxic backlinks clench on your website like leeches. They appear without a notification but the damage they cause is visible.
The good thing is they leave a "trace". That is, they can be traced back to their source which might help in the process of eliminating them for good.
So, after using your toxic link checker tools to find toxic backlinks clinging on your website or if you've received a Google penalty on the same, getting rid of them completely is the next step you should take.
How do you do that? Depending on the number of toxic backlinks on your website, you can opt to:
#1 Request Removal from Webmasters
After making a list of all the toxic backlinks on your website, the first option would be to contact the webmasters who linked to your website and ask them to remove the bad links from your page.
You can reach them by clicking on the individual toxic links that will lead you back to their website where you will get their contact details.
Sending them an email would be the best option or if they are within your residence, a phone call would do.
#2 Disavow toxic backlinks
Disavowing links should only be considered if the previous option has failed or if the links are too many to execute the above method.
To disavow links is to send a message to google to completely dissociate your website with the selected toxic links.
To make this method a success you need to be sure of the toxic backlinks on your website or you'll risk disavowing high quality backlinks and cause more damage.
Create a disavow file by arranging a list of toxic URLs or domains in a text file that you will upload for disavowing.
The URLs or domains should be arranged one by one per line. After that, save the file with a name of your choice ending with .txt
Visit the disavow links tool page, select a property from the property list then proceed to upload your disavow list as instructed.
Once you're done, Google will take care of the rest in a few weeks.
#3 Delete the Infested Page
The last option to consider is to delete the infested page off your website.
It's not the best solution but it's the last resort if nothing else works out (which rarely happens). Or if the toxic links on the page have caused too much damage.
While deleting the page use the status code 404 which means the intended page no longer exists.
Google will recognize the code and remove the content (including the toxic backlinks) from its index saving your website from further damage.
How to Monitor Bad Backlinks?
You don't have to wait until you receive a Google penalty or lose your organic ranking to take action against bad backlinks on your website.
Taking precautionary measures will save you time and the trouble of doing a clean up.
One way you can keep an eye on your website is by evaluating the value of the your backlinks.
The following factors will give you an idea of the value the backlinks on your website have.
#1. The location of the link
Google views backlinks placed on the header or footer of a page as low quality advertisement links therefore the place where a link appears matters.
#2. The anchor text on the link
There are different types of anchor texts that can be used when adding a backlink.
One of them is the exact match anchor text which contains the keywords you're targeting. Overusing it may appear unnatural and raise suspicions to google.
#3. The relevancy of the link
If the topic on a blog post is about electronics then its backlink should be within the same topic otherwise it will be marked as a toxic backlink.
#4. The domain authority score
Domain authority is a search engine result score that shows how successful a site is or will be in search engine results. The higher the domain authority of the linking is, the higher the quality of the link and the lower the score, the lower the quality of the link.
Another way is through investing in backlink audit tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush
Such tools analyze the backlinks on your website and detect potential Toxic Links and toxic links on it.
They can even help you find high quality backlinks and analyze your competitors'.
The tools also provide personalized insights to help you stay on the right track and avoid penalties.
Final Thoughts
No amount of pressure should push you to seek out black hat SEO tactics for the sake of ranking on search engines.
It takes 10 to 30 days to recover from a Google penalty. Time that you would have used to make progress.
Ask yourself, Is ranking on search engines for a few limited days worth losing your website?
Is there any valuable returns you can get in such a short time?
I don't think so otherwise google wouldn't be constantly updating their ranking factor algorithm.
So as you make decisions for your website remember, there's an old saying that goes, "The last thing to grow on a fruit tree is a fruit."
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