Bad backlinks can be of big trouble sometimes. They not only kill your rankings in SERP but also have a negative effect on your SEO. Bad backlinks can be the links from spammy domains, comments, private blog networks, online directories, etc.
Spam links have become even more dangerous now and can lead to the poor ranking of your websites. With bad backlinks, your website has a chance of landing on the second page of the search result, which is a nightmare for the website owner.
Identifying and removing bad backlinks
Checking your website and cleaning bad backlinks regularly is very important for your website and SEO. Getting rid of these backlinks is a three-step process,
- Identifying these backlinks on your website
- Compiling a list of all the toxic domains
- Disavowing them from Google using the Google Disavow tool.
Identifying bad backlinks manually is the best option. This can be done by identifying bad quality website links that identify to you and identifying spammy anchor texts on your platform. You can use specialized SEO tools that are made for this operation. Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, etc. can be your best friend if you want to find these backlinks.
As mentioned above this can be done in two ways as mentioned below
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Identifying Spammy Anchor texts
If you see some irrelevant anchor texts that are not related to your website, then you can take note of them. These are the backlinks concentrated on your website that are responsible for Google penalizing your website. Some SEO tools also offer this feature that provides you with detailed reports of these bad links.
Detecting Low-quality Website links
Different tools use their own metrics to determine the low-quality links on your website. Opening your backlink profile on these tools will give you an insight into the websites that are linking to you. You can make a list out of these which you consider to be spam. You also can see the domain rating which will further help you to identify the bad backlinks.
At this point, you have a list of all the bad links that you have on your profile. Now you need to login into your Google account and use the disavow tool to remove the suspicious link from your website that is a threat to the SEO of your website.
You can make a .txt file of these links which will help you in making the Google search console aware of these bad links. This way you can remove these spammy links from your platform.
Links on your website that are not relevant or spammy in nature can be a threat to the ranking of your website. Therefore it is always advised to get rid of these links through tools such as Google disavow tool. Though the process is a little time-consuming, it ensures that your website does not get penalized by Google.