Bad and Toxic Backlinks You Should Avoid

Have you ever thought about why your website isn’t ranking, even when you have high quality content?

In the world of search engine optimization, links are an essential positioning factor. This means that website owners as well as marketers are very tempted to employ manipulative link play to obtain links, often leading to link spam.

It’s a bad practice which can cause your website to be penalized by search engines and lose both traffic and revenue. To avoid the search engine penalties, it is important to be acquainted with the diverse categories of link spam that includes a variety of harmful links.

In this article, we will explain the categories of bad links you should never use, what toxic backlinks are and how to avoid them.

What are toxic backlinks?

Toxic backlinks or bad backlinks are incoming connections that are detrimental to a website’s visibility in search engine results pages. Most of these links violate Google’s link spam policies because they were posted for SEO reasons rather than for user benefit.

Google measures the prominence and trustworthiness of your website by looking at your backlinks. Some external website links can be beneficial for your search engine optimization.

The frequent disregard, or ‘devaluation’ of links that have been acquired through questionable means is a consequence of Google’s policies and systems that are intended to discourage manipulative link building.

However, a lot of toxic backlinks can trigger a manual action (or Google penalty). This penalty means that your website was part of a systematic spam campaign.

The suppression or removal of your website from search engine results may be a penalty.

Why are bad backlinks an issue?

A Google penalty can be triggered due to bad links and you will experience huge drop in organic traffic and rankings. Your website may be entirely excluded from the search results.

But even if Google doesn’t penalize you, most of the poor links are a waste of time and money because they don’t help traffic or rankings.

When should action be taken?

Google has always claimed that it knows how to algorithmically identify and discount spam links. As a result, you do not have to worry about finding and eradicating each and every hyperlink.

Google’s disavow tool allows you to discount links to prevent link-based penalties. But this is a very harmful instrument for your website.

Methods for Identifying Negative Backlinks

To maintain a healthy backlink profile, you need to be able to identify bad links. And protecting your search engine optimization.

There are two methods to identify detrimental backlinks to your website:

Option #1: Negative Backlink Identification Manually

Manual backlink analysis is the process of looking at each link that goes to your website. This is a time-consuming process. But it helps you understand your link profile. Go to the Google Search Console (GSC) and choose ‘Links’ from the left side menu.  Click on “MORE” in the “Top linking sites” section.

This will give you an inventory of all the websites that are linked to your website. When you proceed to explore a website, you will see a list of your pages that are getting backlinks. Click on a target page to find out which external page is linking to the content of your page. Try to assess the quality of every link leading to your website in just one sweep.

Check for red flags, such as:

• Low authority website, which means that the website often suggests a less reputable or authoritative website.
• Spammy, thin content, keyword cramming, or content that looks like it was generated automatically
• Aggressive marketing tactics like too many ads, pop ups, and calls to action
• A website that has nothing to do with your industry or topic
• No contact information. It’s usually offered by legitimate websites, and rarely by spammy ones.
• Websites that have broken connections (404 errors), which means that the website has been ignored or abandoned
• Websites that are out of date in terms of their design. It may mean that these details are outdated, they may be inactive or perhaps they are not as trustworthy as they will guide.

Option #2: Use a tool to find harmful backlinks.

If each backlink is something that has to be manually verified, use a tool to simplify the process. If you want to use Semrush’s Backlink Audit utility, we suggest you do so. It finds toxic backlinks and comes with an integrated email tool for complete management.

The procedure is as follows.

• Open the Backlink Audit tool, enter your domain name and click ‘Start Backlink Audit’.
• You can configure your backlink audit at your will. Then, click on ‘Begin Backlink Audit.’
• The audit can take a few minutes depending on the parameters of your backlink profile.

Causes of Toxic Backlinks

In this section, nine practices are delineated that can lead to hazardous backlinks.

1. The purchase of links

Don’t pay or take any compensation for standard follow links that could pass SEO value (PageRank).

In the event that you purchase a link, the site proprietor is required to include a nofollow attribute in the HTML code of the link, such as one of the following:

• rel=”nofollow”: Requests that Google ignore the link for ranking purposes
• rel=”sponsored”: Lets Google know the link was bought ad should not rank.

2. Link Exchange

A link exchange occurs when two websites agree to link to each other only for SEO purposes. Too many reciprocal links can cause Google to be suspicious. If you have engaged in link exchanges you may want to remove the links that have been affected from your website.

3. Interacting with Private Blog Networks.

A private blog network (PBN) is a group of websites owned by a single entity and created to link to a particular site or sites. Owning or buying links from PBNs is dangerous because search engines like Google can detect them. Often it is better to remove these potentially harmful backlinks.

4. Utilizing Link Building Bots

Backlinks generated by link building bots are usually in user generated content areas such as forums and comments.

Generally, bot generated hyperlinks are nasty, so it is wise to avoid services that promise you a lot of backlinks in a short period of time.

5. Posting Links That Are Not Natural on Other Websites

Therefore, it’s a good idea to avoid adding unnatural backlinks to your own website, such as when posting on forums, comments sections or social media, as this is link spam and will not look good for your brand.

To ensure that user generated content links are nofollow Google recommends the use of the rel=”ugc” attribute.

The rel=”ugc” attribute is evident on Reddit:

6. Submitting Your Business to Subpar Directories

Listing your business in low quality directories that have no or minimal editorial standards and a very poor user experience can generate toxic backlinks. Be careful when you are dealing with directories that charge fees to list. Not all directories will produce toxic backlinks, but some will. Keep exercising caution while constructing directory listings.

7. Developing Widgets with Links

When you generate an embeddable widget that links to your website, make sure the URL is nofollow. Embedded widgets are not considered valid site endorsements by Google because users who embed the widget cannot control where the link is placed and what anchor text (the text to which the link is attached) is used.

8. Negative SEO Attack on you.

Negative SEO is a tactic that your competitors use to damage your website’s SEO performance. Most of the time, this strategy involves creating fake links to your domain to get a penalty.

Your competitors may be unscrupulous and create false links to your website with the aim of overtaking you in search engine results. However, some SEOs argue that it is actually a better idea to fix these links instead of expecting Google to handle the situation for us.

When should you address harmful backlinks?

Finding bad backlinks can be a downer. But before you do anything, you need to evaluate the circumstances. Not all backlinks are bad. Some may not require immediate attention, as well.

In the worst case, none of the backlinks will lead to negative SEO, they will simply be ignored by Google. If you have a backlink that is particularly spammy, such as a negative traffic trend or outbound anchor texts like ‘casino’ that are completely unrelated to your business, then you should act.

This means that most toxic backlinks won’t be actively hurting your website. But they will not give you any benefits. They will only create irrelevant traffic in your link profile.

However, we advise you to act against certain types of harmful backlinks.

The appropriate time to intervene is as follows:

• If your backlink profile is mainly made up of links from prominent link farms, spam sites or those that use manipulative tactics, you should take action to protect your site’s reputation. • If you have links from unrelated sites with spammy anchor text, it’s time to do a backlink audit and possibly take action.
• If you notice a sharp drop in rankings that seems to be linked to backlinks, it’s time to run a backlink audit and fix the problem.

Eliminating Negative Backlinks

Remove the link

The first step is to try to get rid of the harmful backlinks naturally. That means reaching out to the websites and asking them to take the connections down. This is time consuming but can be simplified by using instruments.

The procedure is as follows:

• Go to Semrush > Backlink Audit > Audit.
• In order to find the most toxic backlinks, select “60-100 Toxic” from the “Toxicity Score” dropdown filter.
• Choose the URLs from the list that you want to be removed.
• Next, choose the “Remove” icon at the top of the list.
• Then you decide whether you want the link removed at the domain or URL level. Select “Domain” and click “Move to Remove” by default.
• You can also manually transfer each backlink to the ‘Remove’ list by selecting the same icon next to the link you want to remove.

Once you have finished adding toxic links to the Remove list, click the Remove tab. This section will show you all the backlinks that you have decided to remove.

Then, choose ‘Send’ next to the link you want to remove to send an email directly to the website owner from Semrush.

You can send a prewritten email draft to the website proprietor through Semrush. Send the email after including the email address of the person you are contacting, revising the draft.

Don’t Use Improper Backlinks

Disavowing backlinks should be a last resort. If indeed it has undesirable side effects and sometimes makes for more difficulties than solutions.

However, if you can’t remove a harmful backlink, you can disavow it in Google Search Console. It tells Google to ignore the link when it looks at the ranking of your website.

This is the method to be followed:

Step 1: Establish a Disavow File

• Go to Semrush > Backlink Audit > Audit > 60-100 Toxic from the Toxicity Score dropdown filter. (As you did when you reviewed the list for removal.)
• Click on the links you want to disavow and click the “Disavow” button.
• Select “Move to Disavow” and choose “Domain.”
• All you need to do is head to the “Disavow” section and then choose Export to TXT, so if anything comes back up, that should save the file on your computer.

Step 2: Send the Disavow File to GSC.

Next, go to Google’s Disavow Links tool and choose your Google Search Console property, which is your website.

Step 3: Submit Your List

Finally, submit your disavow list in the form of a.txt file.

If the file is successfully uploaded, you are good to go. Your list will be integrated into Google’s index. This means that they will consider your disavow requests when they reprocess and recrawl web pages. It may take several weeks.

If you have any errors in your file, they will be displayed promptly in a list. Your prior list will not be replaced. As a result, you can correct the inaccuracies in your new list and try to reupload it.