How to Recognize and Remove Bad Backlinks from Your Website
Backlinks are considered one of the major indicators of a website’s popularity among users. More high-quality backlinks mean more relevant traffic from different sources. Search engines recognize this as a sign of valuable content, promoting your website pages in the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, these backlinks can hurt your website performance if they are spammy, irrelevant, and of low quality.
Bad backlinks are links from low-authority or spammy websites that do not provide any value to users. If Google notices too many bad backlinks to your site, it may soon start penalizing your web pages. Most websites use a backlink checker tool to find toxic backlinks before it is too late. Let’s check out some effective ways to recognize and remove these bad backlinks from your website.
How to Find Bad Backlinks?
If your website has too many backlinks, you must filter them first and sort them by their value. A backlink checker can help you do that. Apart from checking the domain authority of the sites that are linked to your web pages, you should also perform some other checks.
Here’s how you do it:
- Check Backlinks from Domains that Are Not Indexed by Google
When a website is not in Google’s index, it means it was penalized and banned from search results, or it is new, and Google has not crawled it yet.
- Look for Backlinks with Too Many External Links
In some cases, websites with too many outbound links are of low quality. Auto-approved blog comments are one such example. Due to the lack of moderation, the backlink quality remains poor.
- Look for Backlinks from Spammy Blog Networks
A bad backlink may also come from a site that has explicit content or a link farm. Google doesn’t like spammy links that add no value to the overall content.
If your website has such links, you might want to remove them before Google notices. Once you identify such backlinks, you need to reach out to the webmaster or website owner, asking them to remove the backlinks.
How To Remove Bad Backlinks?
It’s important to understand that you cannot remove all of them. However, disavowing the ones you cannot remove is possible.
You need to keep the following things in mind when you reach out to different websites, asking them to remove the backlinks to your website:
- Personalize each email. Don’t let them feel like you are using a generic template for all link-removal emails.
- Use friendly and polite language while asking a website owner to remove your link
- Specify the location of the backlink you want them to remove. You cannot expect every webmaster to spend the time to find hidden backlinks.
- If the webmaster or website owner does not remove the link after an email, send a follow-up email to confirm that they have received the email.
- Do not feel discouraged if you cannot get a link deleted. Even 10-20% conversions are considered good in case of link removal. Consider using Google’s disavow tool.
- Do not pay a webmaster or website owner for link removal, even if people from the other end ask for money to remove links.
How to Delete Backlinks That You Cannot Remove?
If you do not want Google to penalize your website for having bad backlinks and you cannot remove them even after reaching out to the webmaster, disavowing the links is the right thing to do.
When you choose an SEO company, they take care of these things. However, you can use Google’s disavow tool to do it yourself. Just follow the steps below:
To disavow a particular link, you need to identify the URL or domain of the site that hosts the link. Let’s assume the URL is “xyz123.com.”
- Create a Disavow File
Create a text file. Use UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII coding. The proper encoding will help Google to recognize it as a disavow file.
- List the Links You Need to Disavow
Once you have created the file, you need to list every link that you want to disavow. Simply type the URL of the page like this: http://xyz123.com/example.html
You can do this for particular links or disavow entire domains. To disavow entire domains, you need to type like this: Domain:xyz123.com
- Upload the List
To upload the list, you must visit Google’s disavow links tool page and choose a file. Select the correct text file for the website.
For each website you own, you can have a separate disavow list. If you want, you can add more links to the list later and remove them at will.
Conclusion
Bad backlinks are like cancer that gradually weakens your website’s performance and causes it to lose rankings. The earlier you detect these toxic links, the sooner you can get rid of them from your website.
However, it’s worth noting that removing or disavowing these links will not improve your website rankings overnight. It may take several days, a few weeks, and even months to see some results.
Try out some of these tips for yourself and see the difference.
