Bad Links Removal – Why Removing Your Unwanted Backlinks Is A Must For SEO?

What are backlinks? Why is bad link removal important? Link building is an important aspect of SEO marketing; specifically, backlinks help your website’s search traffic, ranking, and visibility by directing visitors to your site. Believe it or not, when your content has a substantial number of incoming links, Google’s algorithm sees it as evidence that your content is not fake; instead, it has valuable information that your audience is searching for. 

Although backlinks are part of off-page SEO, it isn’t always straightforward. Many backlinks can be good, healthy, or maybe even too toxic for your website. These toxic backlinks can eventually harm your website and affect your rankings on search engines. Hence, it is always best to analyze which inbound links work for your website. Having bad backlinks on your website can get you penalized and eventually decrease your chances of content being found. This can, therefore, cause your website to deteriorate in terms of “high-quality” content. 

Bad backlinks are generated from websites with little or lower-quality content, and this has or can damage the trust flow. After all, it’s as if we are asking Google to “select” the winner in terms of SEO. Backlinks are an effective strategy to get a compelling vote of confidence from the algorithm and win a spot in Google’s SERP. That is why utilizing good backlinks is vital for your website’s health. 

What Are Bad Backlinks?

Simply put, all the bad backlinks come from untrusted websites. Since Google’s Penguin algorithm fights web spam, it often “attacks” and filters websites that generate false backlinks to a particular website. So, if you use bad backlinks, you have a higher chance of being penalized by Google’s SERPs. Bad backlinks or toxic links can often weaken your SEO strategies. When you want to rank your website, you usually do so through organic visitors. However, if you are using bad links in your high-quality content, you will receive fewer visitors, which means fewer leads for your business.

Unlike good backlinks, which help you to establish credibility and authority, bad backlinks do more harm to your website and the overall reputation of the website. Bad backlinks or, (nofollow links) can be identified if it doesn’t have any specific relationship with your content. When you are using link building, always ensure that you use relevant services and products to get the right traffic and visitors to your website. After all, if your backlinks are caught by low-quality links, they will likely be considered to be penalized and filtered by Google. 

Why Is It Important to Remove Bad Backlinks?

Backlinks are, as we all know, an important strategy for SEO. When your website uses quality backlinks from reliable websites, it acts as ‘winning content’ to Google’s SERP; this, in turn, lets search engines know that you are a trusted website with valuable high-quality content, which allows your websites to rank higher. As a matter of fact, the quality backlinks have become a ‘talk’ of the internet. The introduction of Google’s Penguin in 2012 has allowed digital marketers to better optimize backlink strategies to utilize in their (online) platforms to ensure that they don’t get penalized. 

If your websites have bad backlinks, it can deteriorate your website by questioning the reputation and credibility of your website; and this immediately triggers Google, which will lead to a detrimental stunt for your business. As a matter of fact, Penguin has officially become part of the core search in Google; this helps detect any spammy websites, which has helped improve the quality of websites over time.  

However, before learning how to remove the problem, you must be able to figure out which of the bad backlinks are harmful to your website which is considered negative SEO. This can help you to distinguish which of the links you have to remove. 

Five Kinds of Bad Backlinks

There are many different kinds of backlinks but how do you identify them? Well, the first of the easiest ways to distinguish them is by analyzing the linking website. In most cases, bad backlinks often come from low authority, suspicious websites which aren’t recognized by Google. Here is a basic list of how you may recognize bad backlinks which you need to remove from your website, or else, you may likely get penalized. 

Links Coming from Link Networks

A link network is a collection of connected websites; they are usually built mainly for the use of generating as many links. They are often camouflaged as blogs and forums but they don’t really have any significance to them, they basically have pointless posts and threads. Plus, they use a lot of repetitive content and cross-link them. Websites that often use this kind of link can often get de-indexed as a result of the value of the links associated. So, always, ensure you get the right kind of backlinks generated. 

Site Wide Links

These are basically, links on all pages from the website; they often appear in the header, footer, and other sections of the website. However, these can be considered unnatural links and can easily get your website penalized. It is better to have one good backlink rather than several bad backlinks. 

Links from Blog Comments

Owning a blog may have given you experience in spammy links comments. These may have links to other websites and links (which are considered unhealthy) If you do not take care of removing these links it will no doubt affect your inbound linking. 

Link Directories

Web directories can often help you to get the best high-quality links to your website. However, if you are generating links from low-authoritative sites, you can get penalized and deteriorate your website’s development. In fact, you have to try and apply ‘good’ backlinks which can be relevant to your articles to avoid being penalized. 

Links with Over-Optimized Anchor Text

Do not use anchor texts with links, this can trigger Google’s spammy links. Anchor text is a massive asset to your SEO strategy. Linking pages to many articles from the same keyword can be seen as unnatural and will be considered mishandled and will be subjected to penalization.  

How to Identify Bad Backlinks?

If you really want to know how to check whether your links are bad or good, just check the below-listed backlink checker, paid and unpaid tools to sniff out those dirty links.  

Google Search Console

To identify bad backlinks through the Google search console, you can download a list of links from Google Console which is a free tool, this can help check if there are any links that are harmful or camouflaged within the bad links. If the list is super long – just go through the most used links. 

SEMRush

With SEMRush you can easily do a bad backlinks audit and see which links refer to certain websites which are connected to low quality links. SEMrush evaluates your spammy backlinks and allows you to see if you are at risk with search engines like Google. As a matter of fact, all the links pointing to your website can help SEMrush identify those unnatural links and you can urgently remove them from your blog post. 

Apart from using SEMrush to detect low quality links pointing to potentially toxic links, it allows you the freedom to request the website owner to remove backlinks through the backlink audit interface or from the Google disavow tool. Therefore, you can keep your link profile clean with regular checkups. 

Majestic

Majestic uses Trust Flow rather than link analysis. Basically, Trust Flow is based on quality rather than quantity. This gives you full access to the search engines based on a review of how you can best search for the spammy blog comments and analyze if your backlink profile is trustworthy.

Moz

Moz has a score metric that analyzes all the comment spam as part of its product. This helps to measure the percentage of websites that have similar toxic backlinks that have been detected by Google. If you enter the URL, you can automatically receive the link database for all outgoing links, this, in turn, provides complete analysis on backlinks for the URLs. 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the best tools readily accessible to those who need a quick analysis of all those dire needs to detect a bad link in your website In fact, looking through to get all those spammy links can be easy with the site explorer and choose backlink profiles. This helps you to select the best ones through the Domain ratings from the high quality to the low quality links.

Easy Steps to Remove Backlinks

If you suddenly lose your standing with search engines, you have got a major problem in your hands. You should be advised to do a backlink analysis and try to remove any bad backlinks which can do harm to your website links. Trying to do link exchange schemes can be detrimental to your website as well. 

If you really have bad links that need to be taken care of and removed. This will serve as an easy guide on how you can simply remove backlinks to better your website in Google rankings and organic traffic to your website link. As a matter of fact, link removal is essential to help you in terms of search engine optimization. 

Things to Consider Before Removing Backlinks

There are countless tools that remove your ‘bad’ links, however, they may often take out your high quality links as well. So, be mindful. Also, you don’t really need an expensive backlink removal tool, it’s better advised to do a backlink analysis and see the best results for your website.

Conclusion 

Link building has become an important aspect of SEO, however, using toxic links can be detrimental to pointing to your website. That is why it is mandatory to always do a link removal to get the best backlink profile to ensure that your website is free from harmful link data which can disrupt your ranking with Google.