How to check and remove toxic backlinks

1. Toxic backlinks come from spammy sites

Most people are smart enough to know that a Nigerian prince doesn’t really want to give them $10 million, but are you just as smart when it comes to noticing spammy backlinks?

There are entire websites dedicated to selling illegal or irrelevant products and these sites are usually filled with spammy backlinks, sometimes to your site.

Not only are they annoying, but they can also be downright harmful to your website.

And it’s not because you don’t want them associated with your brand – if you have too many backlinks from spammy sites, search engines can penalize you, even if you’re completely innocent of any wrongdoing. objectionable.

In fact, you might not even know that spam sites are linking to your website.

It is therefore important to always be on the lookout for spam and bad backlinks.

2. Paid link factories often produce toxic backlinks

Paid link schemes have been around almost as long as search engines, ever since someone first realized that backlinks helped rankings.

How paid link schemes work is simple: links are sold alone or as part of a package, to provide backlinks to site owners looking for a quick way to increase their rankings.

But search engines are aware of this tactic.

They don’t want the top search engine results to go only to whoever has purchased the most backlinks, so these link exchanges are explicitly against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

As soon as search engines discover a new link mill, they start applying a penalty to sites that use it.

3. Toxic backlinks can come from forum or blog comment links (especially foreign ones)

Let’s start by saying: not all forum links are bad.

Those from quality sites with established users and with related content are beneficial.

However, like link mills, if you have hundreds of low-quality links from foreign discussion boards, you’ll want to disavow them before they damage the rankings you work so hard to build.

4. Toxic backlinks are sometimes hidden

Perhaps the very first black hat SEO tactic developed, unscrupulous webmasters still try to denigrate search engines with hidden backlinks, which are exactly what they sound like.

Using text manipulation, background colors, or other means, backlinks are hidden from users and search engines.

This is a clear violation of Google policies.

It’s important to ensure that all links to your site are clear, visible, and comply with Google policies.

5. Paid or sponsored links that pass PageRank are toxic

Another no-no backlinking passes Ranking to the ad buyer.

While buying or selling pay-per-click ads is a perfectly legitimate practice, Google frowns on paid rather than organic links.

You should always use qualifying attributes (eg rel=”sponsored”) to identify these links and avoid being penalized.

Be sure to validate link attributes to stay within Google’s policies.

How to check and remove toxic backlinks

So, we have it all figured out now: safe backlinks are good, toxic backlinks are bad. But now what?

What’s the best way to check your links and eliminate harmful ones?

You could spend hours going through every page in your Google Analytics account, identifying, visiting and verifying each individual link.

Or you can do it easily, with WebCEO Toxic Link Checker.

The most powerful and trusted spam link checker in SEO, WebCEO is integrated with Majestic, the industry’s largest link index database, giving us access to data from over 2,371,111 956,878 URLs, with more added daily.

It’s easy to use:

1. Quickly view all your backlinks: analyze your backlink profile at a glance

Once you sign up with WebCEO, you’ll get a full list of domains linking to your website in a Linking Domains Report.

The WebCEO Backlink Checker helps you quickly determine the number of backlinks pointing to your website, identify common anchor texts, check the diversity and authority of linking domains, and view the ratio of toxic/non-toxic links. toxic.

2. Easily discover good vs. Toxic backlinks: identify the quality

WebCEO’s Toxic Pages report makes it easy to determine which backlinks are helping your search credibility – and which are having the opposite effect.

You can evaluate each backlink individually using analytics metrics like Anchor Texts, Domain Trust Flow, Domain Citation Flow, Alexa Traffic Rank to determine which links to keep.

3. Instantly See Bad Links: Which links are causing your site to lose ranking?

With an exclusive toxicity formula, which can be adjusted to your needs, WebCEO helps you spot bad links so you can disavow them and eliminate the negative impact they have on your rankings.

4. Remove toxic links and prevent them from harming your site: disavow them easily

Creating, importing and exporting disavow.txt files has never been easier.

WebCEO has built-in functionality, allowing you to do this with just a few clicks.

5. Receive alerts when new toxic backlinks appear: schedule an automated scan and set alerts

Once you’ve cleaned up all those pesky bad backlinks, you want to make sure they don’t reappear.

And if they do, you should be prepared to disown them.

WebCEO has a automatic toxic link alert feature which can alert you when new links to your website are discovered.

You can configure WebCEO to automatically analyze the websites you want to monitor.

You can also set email alerts for tasks to be notified immediately of changes.

Between managing your website and mastering the evolution of SEO algorithms, you have enough to do.

Take backlink assessment and toxic link removal off your to-do list and try WebCEO’s backlink checker. Register now and try it free for 14 days.