Backlinks are like social currency on the Internet. They play a big role in how well your website ranks on Google.
To climb higher in search results, you need lots of high-quality backlinks and great content. But you also need to avoid low-quality or irrelevant backlinks.
Join us to learn how to spot and remove harmful backlinks before they hurt your website’s ranking.
What are bad backlinks?
Links from spammy or low-quality websites are considered bad by search engines.
Having lots of backlinks isn’t a problem, but if too many are low-quality, they can seriously slow down your SEO progress—sometimes by months or even years. Here’s why:
- Google Penalties: Google might hit you with penalties if it thinks you’re using shady SEO tactics. This can wipe out your organic traffic.
- Poor User Experience: Low-quality content and techniques like keyword stuffing often come with spammy backlinks. This harms user experience and erodes trust in your brand.
- Weak Link Profile: Backlinks from irrelevant or low-ranking sites drag down the overall quality of your link profile and hurt your site’s authority.
- Damaged Reputation: Search engines see the quality of your backlinks as a measure of your authority. Spammy or low-quality links can hurt your domain authority and reputation.
Regularly checking your backlink profile will help you spot and deal with any risky links.
Types of bad backlinks
Google will eventually penalize you for using spammy or low-quality links.
These penalties can be obvious, like receiving a penalty notice, or more subtle, like a sudden drop in your organic traffic. Either way, they can quickly ruin a carefully built SEO strategy.
To avoid this, it’s crucial to learn about the different types of harmful backlinks and how to steer clear of them.
1. Private Blog Network (PBN) links
Think of PBNs (Private Blog Networks) as the SEO version of fake accounts. They’re a bunch of websites that often share the same IP addresses and hosting services.
PBNs are set up to link to a main site to try to boost its search rankings and create lots of backlinks.
Lately, the term “PBN” is also used for any site that sells links to whoever’s willing to pay. These sites usually cover a wide range of topics but often don’t get much traffic or readership.
Some PBNs are easier to spot than others. Here are a few examples of such sites:
Links from these or similar sites can be problematic for your SEO.
2. Paid links
Building backlinks the right way takes a lot of time and effort. You can speed things up by paying other websites to link to yours.
This can be done through sponsored links or product placements that direct users to your site. The cost usually depends on how authoritative the referring website is.
However, Google views this as a way to manipulate rankings through link-buying. If you choose to pay for links, make sure to use a special link attribute, like the “rel=’sponsored'” tag, to stay on the right side of the rules.
3. Forum and comment spam links
Forum spammers, whether individuals or automated programs, post on open forums like Reddit, Quora, or Discourse to draw attention to their target websites. They might occasionally be called out, but their irrelevant posts usually make them easy to spot.
For example, you might see a lot of comments on a PUBG forum about a website selling cheap gaming hardware. A quick look at the user’s history or the quality of their posts can reveal if it’s spam.
Another type of spammy link is low-quality comment links. These are comments on blog posts, like a recipe for a 10-minute dinner, that link to unrelated sites. For instance, you might see a comment about a “life-changing” course on bitcoin and forex trading that has nothing to do with the recipe.
4. Link farms
These work pretty much like PBNs. The main difference is that while PBNs link to websites outside their network, link farms connect sites within their own group.
They’re all designed with the same goal: to boost the rankings of websites artificially. And it’s strictly against the rules.
5. Irrelevant links
Backlinks are like votes of confidence from other websites, and you get them for creating great content.
However, search engines ignore links from unrelated sites when they calculate your site’s authority. For example, if a T-shirt printing company, a perfume blog, and a classical music site all link to a medical waste management company, those links won’t boost the medical site’s ranking.
6. Low-quality directory links
In simple terms, a web directory is like a list of businesses that are all in the same industry, such as spas and beauty salons in Denmark.
You won’t get any useful backlinks from directories where anyone can submit their own profiles or from directories that aren’t considered trustworthy.
How to spot bad backlinks
Finding and removing harmful backlinks is crucial for keeping your website in good shape and visible in search results. If you don’t, Google might penalize your site, and trust me, you don’t want to deal with the hassle of recovering from that.
Use backlink analysis tools
To keep your website in top shape, you need a tool like Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker. It looks closely at where your backlinks come from and their quality. Here’s what it helps you find:
- How good your overall link profile is.
- Any links that might be harmful or risky, so you can think about removing them.
We used the free version of this tool to check the backlinks for Cabinets To Go, a company that sells modular kitchens in the U.S.
Also Read: SEO Efforts Not Yielding Results?
The first batch of backlinks looks great—they come from trustworthy sites and have relevant anchor text. But as you keep going through the list, you’ll start to notice some problems.
Many of the sites have low domain ratings, and the anchor text and content often don’t match up. This points to issues with the link profile.
Check for irrelevant or low-quality content
Another way to spot spammy backlinks is by checking the quality of the content they come from. Link builders who focus on quantity usually don’t spend much time creating detailed articles or blog posts.
Before you label a backlink as bad for your SEO, quickly check the content it’s part of. You can usually tell if it’s relevant or not in just a few seconds.
If you find backlinks from unrelated sites or poorly written content, it’s best to remove them. If you’re still unsure, tools like Grammarly or Duplichecker can help check for plagiarism.
Remember, a backlink’s value isn’t just about its domain rating. For example, a site with a domain rating of 9 might still link to valuable content, like a detailed review of Cabinets To Go.
Similarly, a website with a high Domain Authority (DA) isn’t always a sign that it’s not spammy. It’s less common, but you’d be surprised at how many high-DA sites can still be spammy.
Look for links from spammy websites
These days, PBNs and link farms use artificial intelligence (AI) to create anchor text and related content for their backlinks. In these cases, it’s crucial to check the authority and source of the backlinks, or the referring domains.
If you have an Ahrefs membership, you can see the domain rating, page traffic, and Ahrefs rank for every website linking back to you.
Ahrefs ranks websites based on their backlink profile and size. If you have too many sites with low Ahrefs rankings linking to you, it’s crucial to clean up those backlinks.
You can also use a similar tool from Moz called Link Explorer. Just sign up for a free account to get started.
Click on the Linking Domains to examine the referring websites. You may look up their spam score and domain rating.
Typically, spammy websites have low ratios of internal to external links. If there are too many external connections, they can be sponsored links.
Analyze anchor text
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker shows you the anchor text for each backlink. If you see anchor text that seems off-topic or overly optimized, it’s usually a sign that the backlink might be problematic.
Just a quick look at our case study’s backlink profile revealed some suspicious anchor texts, like this one with the word “pingback” in it.
It takes you to an article on a film festival that has links leading to websites covering every imaginable niche on the globe, from appliance repair to weight loss.
Alternatively, this backlink exhibits blatant evidence of keyword stuffing within the anchor text.
And the three same ones immediately thereafter.
Each of these links opens a haphazard article on the best universities in the world. utterly unconnected to the sector Cabinets To Go need to be focusing on.
Revamp your link profile
A strong backlink portfolio is a must for any search engine optimization effort. Maintaining the health of your backlink profile and protecting yourself from unethical SEO tactics can be achieved through routine examinations.
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