Nowadays a competent webmaster won't risk implementing some negative SEO techniques! But you would think that some unscrupulous competitors are not above launching negative SEO attacks against top-ranking websites? Some examples include "building spammy backlinks to your domain", "removing your quality backlinks", "website hacking" etc. Building spammy backlinks to a website is the most common method used to try to de-throne top performers.
If, unfortunately, such poor things happen to you website, you should not shrink from the trouble to do something! The process of removing bad backlinks is relatively as simple as the following f steps, if time-consuming!
1. Types of Spamming Links
Pretty much every link which is irrelevant to your website falls in the category of bad backlinks - with the exception of editorial links from large publications.
Listed below are some backlinking types that you absolutely never want to connect with your website:
- Links from penalized domains
- Links from link directories and link farms
- Links from ‘bad neighborhoods’ (porn, pharma, online gambling)
- Links from foreign language sites
- A large number of links from unrelated websites
- A large number of exact-match anchor text links. (Shocked to know this?)
The danger in links from penalized domains and websites pushing knock-off Viagra is obvious - they are poison, and equivalent to building a house right next to a junkyard. Thankfully, Google knows that no one who's trying to rank high would build these links on purpose, so they generally ignore them completely.
Exact-match anchor text links and links from foreign sites are a different story - from Google’s perspective, you could easily be building these yourself to manipulate rankings. That could trigger an algorithmic penalty, or a manual action, which is why it’s always a good idea to try to get rid of them as soon as they show up.
2. Find Where Those Toxic Links Are Coming From
Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, and Monitor Backlinks are useful for this purpose, because they flag all the links that fit their definitions of a 'toxic' link.
3. Request Removal from Website
That said, the chances of getting a low-quality backlink removed by asking the offending webmaster nicely are close to zero. It's a step Google requires you to take before asking them to ignore the link, however, so you should at least attempt it.
In almost 90% of the cases, you won’t be able to find the contact information of the person who has access to that website. Most won’t even have a generic contact page for you send an email through - if that’s the case, use WHOIS Domain Lookup to try to track down the owner.
If you happen to find an email that you can use, but you don’t hear anything back, it’s a good idea to contact the hosting company and ask them to remove the toxic backlinks you’ve identified. They'll be able to assist you in most cases.
4. Create and Submit a Disavow File to Google
At the end of the day, it's highly likely that you'll have to turn to Google’s 'Disavow Links' tool to sort out your link spam problem.
It's a simple enough tool which enables you to import a text file (using Google Search Console) containing all the links you want Google to ignore. You can record specific URLs in it, or you can go broad and ask Google to ignore all the links from a specific domain.
Use the Disavow Links tool carefully, and only after a thorough analysis of your backlinks profile - the last thing you want to do is disavow high-quality backlinks and negatively impact your organic rankings.
After submitting, be patient - it takes time for the file to get processed, and at this point, all you can do is wait for your rankings to start slowly recovering.
(Courtesy: SocialMediaToday.com)
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