Running successful online marketing is not an easy task. It requires a complete devotion, and time, but also a considerable amount of knowledge. You can’t rank high on Google if you don’t know how that search engine functions, and what requirements it has. In recent years, one of the top required aspects of successful SEO management is the quality of the content. However, if you are constantly working on your SEO, but you see little or almost no results of your work, there may be something wrong going on. That is where we come to the point of bad backlinks. If your site has too many bad backlinks, that will certainly have a negative effect on your ranking position and your visibility. That’s why our Link Department team decided to discuss this problem a bit more, and give you some ideas on how to clean up your bad backlinks.
A backlink that is hurting your SEO
When a certain site, through its content, links back to your site, we get something that is called a backlink, or inbound link. From the very beginnings of search engine optimization, backlinks seem to be quite important. Long ago, sites with the greatest number of links were the ones that got the best ranking positions. At that time it was all about quantity, and people were employing various backlink-creating techniques to get among the top search engine results. Consequently, we ended up with a huge number of links, some of which were of disputable quality. Those spammy, bad backlinks made Google pay some more attention to the aspect of quality.
Nowadays, things have changed completely. Building high-quality backlinks became a priority. Spammy backlinks, on the other hand, can ruin your SEO and your site’s online reputation. What’s more, in many cases, they are a sure way to earn some penalties from Google, too. Since recovering your site from penalties takes a lot of time and energy, and in some cases may not be successful at all, you had better do whatever it needs to prevent this from happening.
Detect and clean up your bad backlinks
There is no website that is resistant to earning bad backlinks. Even the strongest and the most popular sites you know have this kind of problem from time to time. The trick with these sites is that they have already gained a strong ranking, and they have numerous robust backlinks with some reputable sites. That’s why spammy backlinks can’t hurt their SEO much, even though they appear. But this should not leave you in despair. If you take care of your backlinks and analyze them with Monitor Backlinks regularly, you will have enough time to fix things and recover your ranking.
Before you start to clean up your bad backlinks you first need to find them. Detecting bad backlinks, however, isn’t always a problem. Not even if you are new to this. When you understand what are the things that can hurt your SEO, you will easily recognize a link that has a low quality and is harmful to your site. Usually, you can track and clean them up by yourself. However, if it happens that you come across some difficulties, you can always rely on some tools to help you out with it.
Quality of the website
Usually, the quality of a backlink is closely related to the quality of the site it appears on. Therefore if you want to detect what backlinks are bad, and what are good, you should start with analyzing the websites.
- A website that appears among the first search results, once you browse its brand name in the Google search, already has high chances to prove as good. But that’s just the beginning of your analysis.
- The next step is checking how much traffic that website gets from the search engines. At this point don’t forget to pay special attention to the percentage of organic visits. And of course, the less traffic the lower site quality.
- Now, no matter what the previous parameters say, you can’t guarantee a site is good unless you check it by yourself. Use the link to visit the website. Rely on pure logic and all the experience that you have to determine how relevant and reliable it really is. And most importantly, see how much it really has to do with your own business. All the backlinks that you collect and that are not related to your industry are automatically bad for your search ranking.
Apply these steps on every site that seems suspicious to you. Then, do that for those that may seem all right, too. You will be surprised how well trained the website owners are when it comes to getting a better ranking and hurting their competitors. So, don’t let the toxic backlinks hurt your SEO. Play it smart this time.
Getting rid of the harmful ones
The very first thing everyone would advise you to try is to contact the owner of the website whose backlinks have a negative impact on your site. You need to figure out the best possible way to request them to remove their backlinks. This is exactly where you need to employ all the diplomatic strategies you possess. The good old beautiful word of iron door open is something that would definitely work here. Leave a polite and honest message. Make it clear what kind of backlinks your business needs, and that their backlink brings you no good.
Still, no matter how well you do your job here, no one can guarantee the owners will ever respond to your request. That’s why we have another solution for you. Make some use of the disavow option that Google offers, and ask it to simply disregard these spammy backlinks when deciding about your ranking position.
So, after all, you still need to keep your eyes wide open. Clean up your bad backlinks right now, and finally enjoy the merits of a successful business.