WHAT ARE BAD BACKLINKS?
Bad backlinks are the links that don’t come from a high-quality, trusted authority sites. As the result, they can and will hurt your SEO if there are enough of them, so it’s essential to know how to spot them and then understand what to do if you find you have them. All modern website owners can understand how important the backlinks are. They also know that you want lot of them if you’re serious about your SEO efforts. Unfortunately, that means the most people adopt a “more is more” approach to collecting the backlinks. However, good backlink building isn’t about a scoring as many links as possible. It’s about earning the high-quality, relevant links from the right sources.
DIFFERNET KINDS OF BAD BACKLINKS
First, you need to know the precisely what types of links qualify, as well as how each type will contributes to a bad score. Here are the few common examples of every digital marketer should know.
PASSING PAID LINKS
PageRank is not the only algorithm Google uses to determine which the sites should rank where on the SERP these days, but it’s nevertheless the significant one. Its purpose is to determine how relevant the particular site is by counting the links that point back to it and the weighing their quality.
UNRELATED LINK
It’s really not possible to overemphasize importance of the relevance when it comes to achieving the top Google rankings. Once upon a time, you may have been able to game the system by accumulating the backlinks from as many high-ranking sites as possible without caring whether they were related to your content, but those days are the long over. These days, Google can be easily tell whether a link represents a genuine vote of the confidence from the site owner or publisher, and the relevance is one factor it will looks at to determine this.
SPAM BACKLINK
Bad backlinks don’t be necessarily have to appear within the body of the webpage or the blog article to potentially hurt your standing with the Google. It’s enough for links back to your site to be part of SEO tactic with a longstanding reputation for abuse. However, the spam comments littered across the comment sections of multiple blogs are highly toxic, as well. This isn’t to that say you can never link back to your site within these contexts, but you do need to be careful how you do it.
POOR QUALITY WEBSITE BACKLINK
It’s not just relevance of the site linking back to you that will determines the difference between the bad backlinks and quality ones. It’s also the overall quality of the site doing linking. Backlinks from the poor-quality sites will almost certainly get you penalized by the Google sooner or later. The worst sites are the sites that were clearly created solely for the SEO purposes. This means they don’t provide any actual value to the audience.
HEADER AND FOOTER LINKS
Since headers and the footers reliably appear on the every page of a particular website, they might seem like logical spots to place the particularly important backlink. However, you should definitely be aware of that today’s Google algorithms can see the right through tactics like those.
HOW BAD BACKLINKS WILL AFFECT?
GOOGLE PENALTIES
If your website has the accumulated a significant number of low-quality links, it can be trigger a penalty from search engines like Google. These penalties can be result in a drop in search rankings or even complete the removal of your website from search results.
NEGATIVE SEO
In some cases, competitors or the malicious actors may create or acquire low-quality backlinks to your website to harm your search rankings. This is called as the negative SEO.
POOR LINK QUALITY
Bad links from the spam or irrelevant sources can be dilute your website’s authority and impact it’s the overall performance. Knowing how to remove the harmful backlinks helps ensure that your backlink profile consists of the high-quality, relevant links that positively contribute to your SEO efforts
HOW TO AVOID BAD BACKLINKS?
Every web admin or the SEO professional needs to be aware of the bad backlinks and make searching for them part of their ongoing search engine optimization efforts. If you have noticed the steep decline in the web traffic that might signal a penalty, you should do audit at your earliest convenience.
PERFORM REGULAR BACKLINK AUDITS
In addition to keeping your own link building efforts as clean, the best thing you can do to avoid the bad backlinks is adding regular auditing to your ongoing SEO to-do list. This allows you to spot and address the problematic links before they hurt you. For best results, run the quick audit twice a month. Your audit tool of the choice may have an option for automating this, so take advantage of it.
DISAVOW BAD BACKLINKS
When and where removals either aren’t successful or aren’t an option at all, you’ll want to disavow a bad links in the question to repair your search engine ranking. Disavowals are the requests sent to Google to ignore the links in the question to ensure they no longer impact your site’s reputation. This is done by using the Google Disavow Tool to upload a disavow file containing the specified link.
AVOID PAYING FOR BACKLINKS
All those services out there that offer to hook you up with the hundreds or thousands of the backlinks in exchange for a small fee sound too good to be true for the reason. The quality of those links will likely be the questionable at best, so you run the substantial likelihood of hurting your SEO efforts.
