SEO plays a crucial role in increasing the rank of your website. Link building is one of those important aspects that are exhausting but equally fruitful when it comes to increasing the rank of a website. Every marketer has to come up with strategies that can yield great results and high-quality links. But keep in mind that not all links are created equal. Even some of the links can turn into toxic backlinking which can decrease the traffic on your website.
There are toxic backlinks that can become a major hurdle in the path to success. So without wasting any time, let’s get started!
Here are a couple of things that you should know to identify and avoid toxic backlinks. In this blog, the major focus will be on:
- What is the meaning of toxic backlinks?
- How to identify those backlinks?
- The impact of poor-quality backlinks
- Expert audit to find and measures to correct toxic backlinks
What is the meaning of toxic backlinks?
Business owners sometimes focus on quantity rather than quality, and that becomes the basis of the problem. Links from non-reliable or spammy sites can lead to a decrease in your website ranking as well as being ineffective.
Toxic backlinks can be the result of a number of activities, which include spam backlinks, bad backlinking strategies, and so on. To save your company from such things it is best to be prepared beforehand.
Now the time begs the question, how to identify toxic or bad backlinks?
The best way to identify toxic backlinks is through Domain Ranking. If you haven’t heard about it yet, scroll down your screen a bit and get the answer.
Domain authority or domain ranking indicates the strength of a company’s backlinks. The score range for domain ranking lies between 0-100. The ideal score, which one must have to rank higher, is above 70. The score is the result of the backlinks from genuine and trusted domains. If you want to avoid toxic backlinks, you should focus on analysing the score with each new one.
The impact of poor quality backlinks
The best way to solve a problem is to understand the cause and impact of the problem. After the above discussion, you are familiar with the cause of toxic backlinks. Now is the time to have a glimpse at the impacts.
- Links that aren’t natural are disregarded. Building ineffective links that aren’t Google-approved can be a waste of time and money. These links will have no impact on your organic traffic because search engines will recognize them but ignore them altogether.
- Toxic links can get a penalty: If according to the Google algorithm, your website has unnatural links, then you might see a sudden decline in the traffic on your page. The reason behind that sudden decline is the penalty.
- Manual actions: Although the chance of manual action against unnatural link building is less, it is not zero. Manual actions can be taken by someone from the Google team only, but the back storey can be anything like it might be the work of your rival company (link spam reporting).
If you are still wondering how to know when you get hit by a penalty, then the decline of visitors to your website page or pages will speak volumes.
If you are penalised manually, Google Search Console will send you a message, and you will be able to analyse the fault in the manual action report by reading the description of the affected URLs.
An audit to find toxic backlinks
Audits can be performed by specialists if you need to have a look at the real picture. There are many professionals in the market that offer SEO website audit services, but you have to make sure that the specialist that you hire can do the work with full efficiency. Professionals can take a look at your web page and tell whether it has a good and strong backlink profile or not.
You can even rectify a couple of things to avoid getting penalized. Are you curious to know about them?
- Remove the ones you have authority over if you realise certain links you built years ago aren’t compliant with the new regulations.
- A disavow file can also be used to delete problematic links. The disavow file informs Google which links should not be considered.
- Try to get the help of professionals to minimise the chances of accumulating toxic links.
Conclusion
You must develop the habit of analysing your backlink profile regularly. You’ll have a better chance of gaining and using the information to improve strategies if you have a better understanding of your and your competitors’ link profiles.
A smart move can take you two steps ahead of your competitors, and you will be able to enjoy a special edge over others. So, don’t waste any further minutes and start analysing your backlinks before you become a victim of the Google penalty.