Identifying and Eliminating Toxic Backlinks: What They are and How to Find Them

Earning high-quality, relevant backlinks is a critical search engine optimization (SEO) tactic. It helps attract high-intent visitors, build trust and drive growth. Toxic backlinks have the opposite effect. A comprehensive backlink strategy that helps you earn quality backlinks and identify and eliminate bad backlinks will enhance the overall strength of your website and its visibility on search engine results pages.

Link building is an important ranking factor for search engine optimization (SEO). Quality links tell Google and other search engines that your site is credible and a good resource for users. They help attract high-intent visitors, build trust and drive growth.

Toxic or bad backlinks have the opposite effect. These links violate Google’s spam guidelines because they aren’t earned. Instead, they are artificially placed specifically to boost SEO – not to benefit users.

A comprehensive backlink strategy that helps you earn quality backlinks and identify and eliminate bad backlinks will enhance the overall strength of your website and its visibility on search engine results pages.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are links to your site in anchor text on another website. The number of links you have to other high-quality websites is one of the factors search engine algorithms use to determine their rankings. The more quality sites your website is connected to, the more likely you are to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs).

A healthy number of organic, high-quality backlinks tells Google and other search engines the content on your site is valuable, credible and relevant to users – a critical ranking factor for Google in particular. Link building also helps search engines crawl your site as they seek out new and updated content to highlight to users.

According to Search Logistics, the top ranking page on Google has an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than pages ranking in positions 2 through 10. Even so, only five per cent of all websites have backlinks pointing at them.

Benefits of quality backlinks

• Quality backlinks build trust with search engines, which leads to improved visibility on SERPs, allowing more potential customers to find you.
• The outreach involved in link building can help you create opportunities for collaboration with other businesses.
• A large number of relevant backlinks will encourage people to spend more time on your site, decreasing bounce rates.
• Backlinks lead to increased referral traffic, as people have more ways to discover your products.

To find quality backlinks, it’s important to focus on credibility and context. Seek out authoritative, reputable sites that feature content that relates to and can enhance the content on your own site.

How Google flags toxic backlinks

Google has put policies in place to stop sites from manipulating link building. The world’s most popular search engine will ignore or “devalue” links that were acquired through questionable practices. However, if Google determines your site has implemented or is the victim of systemic link spamming resulting in a large number of toxic backlinks, it may choose to penalize your site. This may take the form of suppressing your site in search results or removing it completely.

To avoid generating toxic links, it’s important to understand the practices Google’s link spam policy deems questionable. These include:

• Buying or selling links for ranking purposes – with one key exception. Recognizing the role of sponsored content in digital marketing and advertising, Google does allow sites to exchange money, goods or services for a link if these links are qualified with a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute to the link’s HTML code. These tags tell Google not to use the links for ranking.
• Engaging in excessive link exchanges for the sole purpose of cross-linking.
• Using automated link-building programs and bots to create links for your site.
• Requiring a link as part of a contract without allowing the third-party content owner the choice to qualify the outbound link.
• Listing your business on low-quality directories or bookmark sites. These types of sites typically do not vet listings and provide a poor experience to users.
• Embedding keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links in widgets that are distributed across various sites.
• Creating content designed to manipulate linking and ranking signals.
•  Adding external forum comments with optimized links or other unnatural links to your site.

When and how to identify and eliminate toxic backlinks

Google is focused on looking for patterns of manipulation or toxic link profiles – this is key. The odd, low-quality individual link will not trigger any penalty or hurt your ranking. That said, if you are concerned that past or current link building practices contravene Google’s spam policy or if Google has sent you an email to alert you it has flagged unnatural links on your site and issued a manual action, then you should check for toxic links on your site and remove them.

Start by signing into Google Search Console and accessing its Manual Actions report. Google lists all manual actions against your site at the top of the report. If there are no manual actions, you’ll see a green check mark and a message to that effect. If there are, this could lead to relevant pages or entire websites ranking lower or being omitted from Google’s search results. It’s important to find and assess these potentially harmful links.

You can do this by using SEO tools such as Ahref’s Site Explorer or Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool. For example, Backlink Audit will do a comprehensive assessment of the quality of backlinks on your site, provide a list of suspicious links and help manage them.

You can also find and address these bad links yourself via Google Search Console. Here are the steps Google recommends:

1. Review the Manual Actions report to see which pages are affected and what type of issue(s) you’re facing. The most common types of manual actions include: pure spam or Black Hat SEO; thin content with little or no added value; and structured data issues outside Google’s guidelines. You’ll have to check out each domain Google lists to determine if it’s problematic.
2. Expand the manual action description panel on the report to learn more about the type of issue and follow the “learn more” link to gain more detailed information about the specific issue you’re dealing with and steps to fix it.
3. Fix the issue on all affected pages. Leave no pages behind. If you have multiple manual actions, learn about and address each of them.
4. When you believe all the issues have been fixed or are not applicable, click “request review” in the report. Be sure to explain the exact quality issue on your site and the steps you’ve taken to fix it, and provide documentation of the outcome of your efforts.
5. You will get a review confirmation message when you send your request and another when Google accepts or rejects your request.

Ensuring your website is both attracting quality backlinks and avoiding toxic backlinks is a critical tactic that will boost the impact of your overall SEO strategy. It’s also a competitive advantage – one that too few brands are using.