You want to preserve your SEO. Good SEO means that when potential consumers search for certain keywords, they will find you first on Google’s list of results. That’s because those keywords connect to the products or services you sell. Google, however, has programs designed to identify pages that over-optimize for SEO or promote spam. Then they enact penalties. That is how we get the results on page ten and beyond for your searches.
Even if you monitor your keywords and provide meaningful content, other factors can sink you. One of these factors is “bad” backlinks. You don’t want these on your website.
What Are Bad or “Toxic” BackLinks?
A regular backlink is a hyperlink to another page. Backlinks to your website boost SEO rankings, which is good. It means that another website is referring to your page, or vice-versa. You would rather have other websites referring you in backlinks rather than the other way around. Even so, you also want to inform consumers while selling them products and track your knowledge sources.
A bad backlink is when your website has links that don’t lead to useful sites for consumers. In fact, Google would register these links as “manipulative”. Google then will sink your page ranking, so you’ll be lucky to show up on page twenty of certain keywords. In short, these backlinks are parasitic and have a detrimental effect.
Usually, you get these bad backlinks when a firm or person you trust incorporates them to promote spam. Other times bots and spammers may post them in blog comments. They do this to get unwitting users to click on them. This is why it’s good to moderate your blog comments before they appear publicly. Nevertheless, there are other ways these backlinks can sneak past you such as in headers and footers.
4 Red Flags For Finding Bad Backlinks
1. Irrelevant Links
This will the most obvious one. If you find links on your website that go to pages that do not matter or inform about products similar to yours, then they are toxic. Or worse, if these links come from areas that you don’t serve, in languages that you don’t use, then you want to delete them.
2. Low-Ranking Links
You want to make sure that your links go to pages that have a reasonable amount of traffic unless you are trying to plug or endorse a potential partner. Especially since backlinks boost the linked site’s ranking, you need to take note if these links don’t show up easily in search results.
3. Repetitive Anchor Text
Anchor text is the text used in a hyperlink when you don’t want to copy-paste a URL wholesale. Usually you want it to be unique, because Google identifies copied text on sites verbatim. If you see the same anchor text that you didn’t write, however, on your site and on other sites wholesale, then that merits concern.
4. Multiple Outbound Links Having the Same Domain
This isn’t necessarily a guarantee that the backlink is bad, but you may be questioning why your sources aren’t diversified. Showing only one domain implies a certain bias towards particular sources. If you didn’t approve that, then that shows concern.
Steps to Identifying Bad Backlinks
You should have a process for doing routine cleanups of your website, especially if your ranking appears abysmal. Even if you are putting all the links on the website yourself, it can’t hurt to do routine checks.
Monitor Google Ranking
Always do this. See how you are doing in terms of SEO, and compare your standing with the strategies implemented. Eliminate all the possibilities for receiving Google penalties before concluding that toxic backlinks are responsible.
Acquire Your Website Raw Text Data
Several website programs can help with this so that you can look at the website content and anchor texts. Export it to a sheet analysis program like Microsoft Excel that will allow you to enter formulas to analyze text health. Use these formulas to identify trends, or ask your IT department to perform this routine health inspection.
Inform Your Webmaster, Hosting Service, or Site Owner
The person running your website, if you are outsourcing, needs to know about this potential danger. If their job is to run your website, they may know about potentially spammy backlinks. They may be able to provide the backdoor to removing these links before they become serious.
Reach Out to Us
Backlink Patrol can help you identify these bad backlinks, and we have processes that streamline link removal. We have a few years of experience as well and keep up with changing Google penalties, and search consoles to provide analytics.
Contact us today to find out more. Let us assist with website cleanup and proper backlink management.