Backlinks are a major part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). They provide valuable signals that search engines use to figure out whether your website is relevant to a searcher’s query. Building backlinks is an involved process, and it’s normally handled by professional SEO Brisbane agencies.
Working with a professional team ensures your backlinks are an asset to your website and can help you avoid issues like toxic links. If you do have toxic links, we’re going to help you identify and remove them from your website before they can do any serious harm.
What are Website Backlinks?
Every time you perform a search on Google, Google combs through its database of websites to find the results that are most relevant to your query. These days Google uses hundreds of different signals to figure out whether your website is relevant or not. Backlinks are one of those signals.
Backlinks are hyperlinks from a third party website that lead back to yours. Google sees these backlinks, and it uses them to determine whether your website is high quality and authoritative. To keep it simple, we could say that each backlink acts as a vote of confidence that the content on your website is valuable and relevant.
What Makes a Link Toxic?
Not every backlink is a good one. While Google might see a backlink as a vote of confidence, it can also identify when a backlink is spammy, unrelated or trying to game the system. These links are considered toxic and they can do serious harm to your website’s rankings.
Some common examples of harmful backlinks include:
- Irrelevant links – Links between related websites (e.g. websites that cover similar topics) are a great way to boost your SEO. Links between unrelated websites may be considered toxic. Backlinks from websites that are too far removed from your industry may be considered spam or a method of cheating the system.
- Paid links – Paying for backlinks is strictly against Google’s terms of service. While it’s possible to find paid backlink services that provide high quality links, most provide no value, so Google sees them as spam.
- Links from penalised sites – Google places penalties on websites that have violated their terms of service. A Google penalty can seriously damage your website’s rankings. If you have backlinks from a site that has received a penalty, Google sees that as a signal that your website is also low quality.
- Links from low quality sites – When it comes to backlinks, quality trumps quantity. Having a few, high quality backlinks can be a major win for your SEO. Having lots of low quality backlinks won’t help you. In fact, having links from very low quality websites may actually harm your SEO.
- Spammy links from comments – This tactic has become much less common, but there was a time when sneaky SEOs would use bots to post spammy links on forums and in comments sections. These days, these links are considered toxic and are a quick way to get your website penalised.
Toxic links are more than just a nuisance. If your website collects too many toxic links, Google may decide that you’re trying to cheat the system. This can result in a penalty being placed on your website, and you may lose your organic rankings.
How to Remove Toxic Backlinks
Removing toxic backlinks is a manual process, but it’s an important part of your SEO strategy. You should review your backlinks every few weeks to ensure each link meets your quality standards. During your review, you can deal with toxic links by:
- Identifying Unwanted Links
The first step in the process is to review all the links coming into your website, and then identify which ones are toxic. You can use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and Google Search Console to check the links coming into your website.
These tools can be used to generate a list of links and assign a quality score to each one. Links that are very low quality should be considered toxic. Links that are middling quality are okay to use, but they provide very little value to your SEO strategy, so you should keep an eye on them to make sure the quality doesn’t decrease over time.
- Contacting the Website’s Owner
Once you know which backlinks you want to remove, you should contact the website’s owner or webmaster. This can be done over email. Simply get in touch and ask them to remove the hyperlink from the page in question.
Most webmasters will be happy to comply with a polite request. In most cases, toxic links aren’t malicious, and the webmaster may have been well-meaning when they posted the link originally. If you can’t reach the website’s owner or if they won’t remove the backlink, you’ll need to move onto Step 3.
- Disavowing Unwanted Backlinks
The last resort for dealing with toxic backlinks is to create a disavow file. Disavowing links is an advanced feature that tells Google to disregard backlinks that come from certain URLs or domains.
A disavow file is a simple txt document that’s uploaded to your website. Google’s robots read this file and ignore any links it contains. This is useful for getting rid of unwanted links, but it’s particularly helpful if your website is being targeted by malicious attacks.
