The major thing that most digital marketers and website owners aspire to is to take their websites to the top of search engine results. High-quality backlinks are important to earn that.
Backlinks are an incredibly important part of SEO. Whilst things like content are extremely important. Backlinks are still one of the main ways that Google understands and measures authority of any given website. In order to rank prominently for competitive searches, you will need some nice backlinks pointing at your website.
But not all backlinks are friendly. Some might be really bad. Historically bad backlinks have been the cause for dragging websites down in rankings. Bad backlinks at various points in SEO history have been very bad news.
Many of these backlinks are created by websites automatically that just scrape and post content. Some are created by crooked competitors trying to damage your ranking by building links on junky websites in order to get you penalised. This is known as negative SEO.
Negative SEO is common in some markets. The sites of companies in competitive spaces can get beaten continuously by bad links from competitors trying to hurt their rankings.
Negative SEO can be of different forms but it’s often a combination of the following tactics:
- Creating spammy backlinks to your domain
- Removing your quality backlinks
- Website hacking
Creating spammy backlinks (also called ‘bad’ or ‘toxic’ links) to a website is the most common way used to uncrown top performers.
Is it so important to remove bad backlinks from your site?
Yes, removing these backlinks from your website is important for a lot of reasons. Having bad backlinks will give you a bad impression. Bad backlinks are a high indicator that you, or whoever is responsible for implementing your SEO strategy, are using some questionable methods to try to boost your site in Google rankings. During the year 2012, Google introduced Google Penguin. It searches for sites who resort to using bad backlinks.
From 2016, this technology is called as a standard component in the search algorithm. This conveys that it now monitors sites around the clock for spammy links. If you get caught and experience a serious penalty from Google don’t be surprised. Your search rankings will drop tremendously if this happens, which will be significantly difficult to bounce back from. They might even opt to ban you from search results altogether. So, this remarkably affects the volume of traffic pointing to your site.
How to remove backlinks
As you got a general idea of the links that you don’t want for your website, let’s destroy them. Basically, there are number of ways to get rid of these links so they won’t damage your Google rankings:
- 1
This one is simple: Obtain the information of the website owner and ask them to remove the link. That doesn’t mean to demand the other website to take the link down, instead ask gently. That usually works better. Despite that, you might also face webmasters who ask you to pay for link removal or may not reply at all. In cases like these, you must disavow the unwanted links that can’t be removed.
- 2
Analyse which low-quality pages on your website are linked by bad backlinks and remove the pages (404/410) rather than the links. That is actually not what you want, as most pages will have value for your website. Along with that, a lot of 404s send the wrong message to Google as well. Together with getting rid of the page, you should also disavow these bad backlinks.
- 3
Remove the domain and begin all over. But if your site isn’t worth investing to clean up these bad backlinks, that might be a useful method.
- 4
You can also disavow the links, if you have a lot of backlinks you want to remove, or webmasters aren’t responding to your call to remove the link. That’s essentially telling Google you favour these links not to be taken into account when assessing your site.
Wrapping up
It is noticed that it’s very crucial to understand how backlinks will impact your website, positively and negatively. Spending the time to clean up your site and getting rid of any backlinks that may be hindering your strength to climb up the Google ranks is well worth doing.
