Spam Backlinks: Locating & Removing Toxic Links for Better SEO

Spam backlinks are a serious problem for the search engine algorithm. Google and other search engines use spam backlinks as a way to gauge whether a website is trustworthy, so if you’re found to have too many of these links, it could hurt your rankings. Spam backlinks are also known as toxic links because they can cause serious damage to your site’s reputation and even lead to penalties from Google. To improve your SEO rankings, SEO Agency Australia experts say that it’s important that you understand how toxic backlinks work in order to identify them and remove them from your website.

What are spam backlinks?

Spam backlinks are links that are created to manipulate Google rankings. They can be created by automated software or by a human–but they’re not always easy to spot. Spam backlinks can be created in a variety of ways, including:

Comment spam (e.g., posts on online forums, guest posts on other sites)

Directory submissions (e.g., Yelp, Facebook)

PBNs (private blog networks)

How Spam Backlinks Can Harm SEO Rankings

But there are other types of spam that can also affect your search rankings. These include:

Links from low-quality websites. If you have a link from a website with low domain authority or no content, it won’t help you much, if at all.

Links from sites with no or little authority. The same applies here—low-quality sites aren’t going to be giving Google any reason to rank your site higher in search results pages (SERPs).

Links from sites with no or little social engagement. Again, this isn’t going to help you out at all since these are links from sites that aren’t being used by the public and don’t have much influence on search engine algorithms (SEO).

How can I tell which backlinks are harmful?

Examine each of your links to determine where they originate. Links from high-quality websites should be kept, whereas spam backlinks from spammy or low-quality websites should be removed. Your links should probably be removed if they originate from any of the websites listed below because they are hazardous.

• Websites that are obviously spammy, pornographic, lending or gambling websites
• websites that Google has not indexed
• websites with malware or virus warnings
• Websites without Domain Authority
• websites with brand-new domains
• websites that receive a low traffic
• Connect networks

How to Remove Toxic Backlinks?

So, here’s what SEO agency Australia experts guide the future; once you have identified the toxic backlinks, the next step is to remove them. Here are a few of the best ways to do this:

Use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs (or another link analysis tool) to find toxic URLs.

Use your Google Search Console account to find toxic URLs and pages pointing to your website that shouldn’t be there. 

While there, you can also request that Google reconsider its indexing of that page and other pages on your site that contains similar content. To do so, go into “Manage sites” and then select “Disavow Links.” 

There are some limitations with these features, but they can still be very helpful in removing spammy links from certain specific directories or domains in certain situations (but not all).

Conclusion

I hope the information in this post has been helpful to you. As a business owner, it’s important to stay on top of your SEO, and that means knowing what backlinks are good (and bad) for your site.