Once upon a time, running a successful business was all about having a nice store with high-quality products. Nowadays, when the market grows every single day, bringing more and more competition, things have changed immensely. We have numerous similar services and products offered, and it’s only a matter of their marketing strategy that leads customers to choose one option rather than the other. In the world of online marketing, a good strategy is one that would bring your website among the first search engine results. Having a good SEO is a great way to start. But this online fight is not always a fair one. There are many website owners who would do whatever it takes in order to destroy their competitors. They use various techniques to create negative SEO and attack your website. Today we’ll discuss bad backlinks and offer basic steps to removing spammy backlinks from your website.
What are bad backlinks?
Every businessman knows that reaching the top-ranking positions on a search Google, or some other search engine takes time. There are many things you need to take care of in terms of SEO management. The content you share, and the competition on the market. Thus, for example, it really does matter what kind of backlinks will appear on your website.
Having high-quality backlinks, of course, is a sure way to achieving your top-ranking goals. Unfortunately, not all links that you get will be useful for you. You should beware of the so-called bad or spammy backlinks. Those are unnatural forms that have a negative impact on your SEO. What’s more, building these toxic backlinks became one of the most popular tactics that website owners use to destroy their competition.
Why do we need to get rid of the toxic backlinks?
As we have mentioned before, if you want to work on your reputation, using a good backlink strategy is extremely important. So, getting backlinks from some websites that already have built up great authority will bring some importance and credibility to your website too.
On the other hand, collecting toxic backlinks will have the exact opposite effect. Not only will that indicate to the search engines that your site cannot be trusted, but you will probably have to deal with some serious penalties, too. Consequently, your ranking will drop, sometimes even to the very bottom of the search engine results. What’s more, when all of this happens, you’ll have to spend a lot of time searching for the appropriate tools and strategies which will help you recover from the penalties, and regain your previous position.
Therefore, the best thing you can do is to take care of the links that appear on your website. Even though Google has begun to ignore most of the spammy links, you cannot only rely on its experience. Do the checks regularly, and keep your website clean by removing all the inappropriate links right away. Bring in mind that some of your competitors will be really persistent in the attempt to get rid of you and your business. If you do not remove their spammy backlinks, those backlinks will remove you from the market.
What you need to do if you want to remove spammy backlinks from your website
The removal process is something everyone can learn how to do. On the other hand, there are always professionals that have so much experience in the field such as Link Department, and that can give you several useful pieces of advice. Now, here’s what to do.
1. Gathering the information
Make sure you have an insight into all the backlinks that arrive on your website and put them on a list. Only if you have a clear picture of what is coming to your website, you can discover the irrelevant backlinks, those which have a negative impact on your authority building. In this process, you can always turn to some trustworthy tools, such as Google Search Console, or some other backlink checker.
2. Discovering the spammy backlinks
This step will take you some time, but you need to remember it’s crucial. In order to find out which links are good and which are bad, you need to check every single link you come across one by one. Every link whose content isn’t related or relevant to your business and your website is useless. It brings no value to your ranking. What’s more, it may even be harmful to it. So, first, make it clear what type of backlinks your business really needs, and then go further on in removing spammy backlinks from your website.
3. Getting rid of the links – the last of the steps for removing spammy backlinks from your website
Here comes the point when you need to get in touch with the owner of the website whose link is considered toxic. Ask them to remove their link from your website as soon as possible. Remember you need to be polite and patient. In some cases, it can take time until you get the owner’s answer. What’s more, you can’t just sit and wait for it to happen. It is important to check your website from time to time, just in order to make sure whether or not they have removed the problematic link.
However, the experience tells us that the desirable contact information is not always easy to find. In that case, you can turn to the other option- Google. Report all the bad backlinks and ask Google to ignore them. Its ‘Disavow Links’ tool will deal with your problem. However, you need to use it cautiously if you don’t want to ruin your ranking by accidentally disavowing some high-quality links.
Now that you know all the major steps for removing spammy backlinks from your website, there is no reason why you should let your competition using cheap tricks to ruin your reputation and your hard work. Just be cautious and always act on time.