Poor quality backlinks is a headache because it does much harm despite sometimes getting traffic and improving ranks for brief moments. Simply put, you cannot have bad or poor backlinks in your inventory because it can raise questions about the legitimacy of your business. Now, that backlinks often flow to websites without asking, and it is not possible to check every link before accepting it, a few questionable backlinks can always creep into your inventory. While it is ideal to have a backlink profile free from poor quality links, in practice, it does not happen that way, and Google accepts the limitation provided it happens naturally without any specific intention behind it. However, if Google discovers a pattern in the poor quality backlinks, it can have serious consequences.
Despite your efforts to keep away from poor backlinks you might become a victim of PBNs that syndicate content and negative SEO that can eventually lead to a backlink profile full of dubious links that go against Google’s guidelines. Therefore, you must stay alert about the quality of backlinks in your possession and get rid of poor or toxic links that can damage your SEO prospects. To achieve your goal, you must conduct regular backlink audits under the guidance of some SEO company like SEO Toronto Digital Rocket Fuel, an SEO company.
Quality over quantity
The number of backlinks in your inventory is important but more important is link quality because that is what matters to search engines. By doing periodic backlink audit, you can have a clear picture of the kind of links that you have and its quality. Once you identify the toxic links, you must take action for disavowing it or removing it completely so that search engines do not consider it when indexing the web pages. By undertaking a backlink audit, you demonstrate your good intentions of maintaining a clean and quality backlink profile that sends positive signals to search engines about your commitment to play the game by the rule.
Complete cleanliness is impossible to achieve
The backlink audit will point out the harmful links, and you must take action to get rid of it so that there is not a single poor quality link in your inventory. Well, this would be ideal, but in reality, it is not possible to clean your inventory 100%. Rather, you must take a pragmatic view about how much you can achieve in removing toxic or poor quality backlinks. Admitting the fact that you cannot remove every single bad backlink, you must take the approach of treating backlinks as insect or pest infestation and get rid of as many toxic links as possible and then live with the rest of them. This should be okay because there are chances that you can use them to your advantage. After removing the ones that you can, make plans of using the rest to improve your online reputation.
What is toxic backlink?
Ever since Google introduced the concept of link quality to prevail over quantity, it became clear that all websites, whether knowingly or unknowingly carry toxic backlinks. To determine whether a backlink is toxic or not, you must look at the originating website and evaluate its quality because good backlinks emanate from good websites only. For example, if you get backlinks from a website that has an excessive focus on monetization, it could be a red flag for you. Similarly, websites that have poor or flawed security and adopt Black hat techniques are dangerous in the eyes of Google and equally bad are link farms.
Identifying toxic backlinks
You must use some tools to help you in identifying poor quality backlinks. The tool provides a complete list of backlinks in your inventory and will identify the suspicious links by flagging it and marking it with a warning sign. Whenever a linking domain triggers a low-quality signal, the warning sign appears.
Spam score – Moz calculates the spam score of websites to determine its likelihood of attracting penalty from search engines. It uses a number of factors like a high ratio of following links, a low number of linking domains, etc. to determine the spam score. The higher is the spam score – 8 or above; poorer is the quality of the website.
Trust flow – If the Trust Flow score is less than 10 or 10, it is a sign that you may have a toxic link. Since Trust Score has relation to the age of the website, this rule does not apply to newer websites about a year or two old because it is still in the process of building trust and will take some more time to develop the score.
Domain authority (DA) – Moz uses the DA score to predict how much the website is worth for good rankings with respect to its backlink profile. Low domain authority increases the risk of toxic link, and a score of 40+ is quite acceptable. However, newer websites will have low DA because they are new, and like Trust score will take time to develop domain authority.
Backlink pattern – Compare the backlink whose quality you are suspicious with some other backlinks to see if there is excessive optimization of anchor text. Normally, quality sites use a variety of anchor text, but if these are all exact match keywords, it reveals a pattern that makes it obvious that the link is toxic. Good anchor text includes the brand name, partial keyword, and URL.
The website not indexed – If you obtain links from websites yet not indexed by Google, do not hesitate to get rid of it immediately because there are high chances that it is of poor quality.Read more about SEO company.
To remove the toxic backlinks, get in touch with the website owners, and ask them to remove brand mentions and the links. You can obtain the contact information from the website and send a list of all links to remove. It might require some follow up to get the job done but if there are no results, disavowing the links is the last resort to maintain a healthy backlink profile free from toxic links.