To improve its natural referencing on Google and other search engines, the acquisition of links (or backlinks) is the most important SEO strategy to adopt. The links are indeed the most powerful lever to arrive in first position. Unfortunately, it can happen that our efforts are reduced to nothing because of toxic links which come to severely taint our profile of links. These links, whether voluntary or not, send the wrong signal to Google, which may decide to penalize your website if it concludes that these backlinks have been artificially created to better position themselves in search results. It is therefore better to know how to spot and delete them quickly in order to start again on a sound basis and obtain (or find) good results in the rankings.
What are toxic links and where do they come from?
Most of the time, the low quality links that a website receives come from spammy sites. Spam is as old as the internet itself, but many don't know what it really means. Spammy backlinks are usually placed in blog comments, forum threads, or low-quality sites.
There are several reasons why you receive toxic links like this. If you've recently hired an unscrupulous or incompetent SEO, they may have used this technique to artificially inflate your rankings. These backlinks can also come from site publishers who are not aware of sending you "bad juice" and who had no bad intentions at the base.
Finally, some unfair competitors may launch negative SEO campaigns . Their goal is simple: to harm you with toxic links that will make you lose positions. Failing to raise their site, some choose instead to downgrade the sites of their competitors. This is a practice of course prohibited by Google and which is considered immoral even in marketing!
Related: Tips for developing the internal mesh of your website
How do you know if you are the victim of toxic links?
There are several solutions and SEO audit tools to find out if your website is receiving toxic links that you are not responsible for.
A notification in the Google Search Console
If you receive a message in your Google Search Console account, it's a bad sign. This means that Google has not been able to determine whether your links are spam (which it says it knows how to ignore) or artificial links that you have created.
A sudden drop in traffic
An algorithmic or manual Penguin penalty is unforgiving and kicks in very quickly, and sometimes even overnight. If you encounter this scenario, analyzing your backlinks is a priority!
A netlinking strategy that does not bear fruit
You have redoubled your efforts to obtain quality links but you do not see any change in your positioning. On-site technical problems and/or bad content can explain this stagnation, but it is also possible that you are swimming against the tide because of toxic links.
A sudden increase in the number of backlinks
Getting quality links is hard work. If you receive dozens or hundreds of links in a very short period of time, it's a safe bet that something is wrong! Of course, this last point must be qualified, because very large popular sites can quite generate a lot of natural links following a simple advertising campaign or on social networks.
Related: Backlink and netlinking: what is it?
How to recognize toxic links?
If all the indicators are about green on the on-site side, then you need to comb through your link profile. We're not going to hide it from you, it's time-consuming and sometimes laborious work, especially for large websites that sometimes receive tens of thousands of links. However, you can prioritize your actions by focusing on certain types of links that are likely to come from spam sites.
Links from directories
Backlinks from directories are a classic. Once used excessively in SEO, these types of websites still tarnish many link profiles today. These directory sites have no other purpose than to send links to sites in order to improve their natural referencing. It used to work, but not anymore! They generally have no specific theme and little content, so they are penalized by Google . It is therefore better to avoid having your website on this type of directory.
Spam links generated by bots
If you've ever administered a site or blog where comments were open, then you must have suffered a regular onslaught of generic comments, such as "great article thank you", with a link in the body of the message or on the name of the author. Behind these comments hide robots responsible for publishing them en masse. They therefore have no added value and can be harmful to you.
Links from foreign sites
Your website is in French, but you receive links in Polish? Then there is a good chance that it is spam! In principle, Google is savvy enough to ignore these links. But, if you have the possibility to remove them easily, do not hesitate.
Links on sites with duplicate content
Some unscrupulous and frankly not very fine editors have fun copying sites partially or in their entirety. By the way, they can also copy internal links which become for them outgoing external links… and therefore backlinks for you! Of course Google tracks sites whose content is not unique. In such cases, you are fully entitled to report said site to Google.
These 4 types of toxic links are the most easily spotted, mainly because of the domains that are often obvious! But some bad links are much more vicious and require further study to find out if they are good or bad for your SEO.
Observe the themes of the sites
Do you sell car parts and receive links from websites classified as video games or worse, pornography? This is a bad sign, even if the sites in question excel in their field. Google attaches great importance to the cohesion between the themes of the sites .
If the difference between the themes is not so obvious and you hesitate to keep this link or not, ask yourself if it has a real interest for the Internet user who will come across the article in question. If it doesn't seem to have any interest, then the link is useless or harmful for your SEO. If the link comes from a domain name with a general theme, then focus on the theme of the page itself.
Evaluate the content of the linking website
The theme seems good, it's not a directory or a foreign site. Then you think the link is relevant. Once again, beware of these links that are a little too good to be true and focus on the content of the site . Is it regularly updated? Are the articles of high quality and not duplicated? If it's a YMYL site, is it really trustworthy? If you can't answer "yes" to these 3 questions, it's time to reconsider the interest of this link!
Detect overoptimized anchors
Overoptimized anchors are the prerogative of toxic links. These are simply the keywords used to create the link. You will find them very easily on a backlink analysis tool, such as Semrush, Ahrefs or Majestic SEO. These anchors will always be the same, regardless of the landing page. If your car parts site receives 100 links with the anchor text "car parts", take a close look at them. If you are at the origin, then be sure to recontact the editors of the websites to modify the anchors and make them more natural.
As a reminder, 60% of the anchors must relate to the name of your brand or your site, because it is the natural behavior of Internet users. The rest must oscillate between exact anchors, broad anchors, URL anchors…
Scan link locations
It may happen that one of your partners spontaneously links to your website. You then recognize his domain in the list of your backlinks and are therefore reassured. Still, depending on how he implemented it, he can harm you. This is particularly the case for sitewide links (on the side of the site, on all pages) and links in the footer . These links are multiplied by the number of pages the website contains. They are therefore less themed and less well seen by Google.
This type of link can be extremely powerful for your SEO, but you have to know how to use them sparingly. Indeed, receiving links in the footer or in a sidebar is not something "natural".
Hunt down unindexed sites
Your SEO tool detects a link, but you cannot find the site in question on Google? It is therefore possible that the latter was penalized by Google. To check this, use the command site:example.fr and see if any pages from this site appear. If you can't find any pages, then it's best not to keep the links.
Check the ratio of dofollow and nofollow links
A natural link profile must include a majority of dofollow links, but also nofollow. If you find that 100% of your links are dofollow, we advise you to select the less juicy ones and switch them to nofollow. This de-optimizes your backlink profile and looks more natural.
Measure website traffic
Traffic is a strong signal for Google. If you can't decide on the fate of a link on a website that seems rather interesting, use your SEO tools to get an idea of the traffic generated by this site . If the latter shows a desperately flat curve, it is either too recent or shunned by Google…
Related: Magento: 11 tips to optimize the SEO of your e-commerce site
How to remove toxic links?
If there are many tricks to detect a toxic link, there are unfortunately few solutions to get rid of it.
Contact the website editor
Asking the site owner nicely to remove a link is the most effective solution, because you are assured that the link is actually removed. Unfortunately, it is common to receive no response, either because the person no longer takes care of the website, or because it was simply an automatic link. It can also happen that spam sites do not display any contact page. In this case, it is impossible for you to contact the person in charge of the publication.
Disavow links
To help webmasters better manage their link profile, Google has made its link disavow tool available on Search Console. It is possible to disavow backlinks piecemeal or en masse. In other words, you are telling Google that you are not responsible for these links and therefore should ignore them.
If this tool seems magical, in reality it is far from being a panacea. In practice, SEOs have found that it is not as effective as it claims. To defend itself, Google simply indicates that its robots are intelligent enough to recognize spammy links. In any case, a link disavow file is quick to make and costs nothing. And even so, Google still collects this data, so we can hope that it uses it to determine which websites are most often reported as spam. By extension, you therefore encourage him to ignore these toxic links in the future.
Conclusion
The detection and removal of toxic links is of paramount importance for any website. Small sites with a rather "light" link profile are the first to be affected by toxic links which will have a much greater effect than on a large site which has thousands of them. To be able to act quickly, we recommend that you regularly check your new links. You will thus be able to be much more reactive in the event of a suspicious drop in traffic.
At NaddraBlog, we ban spam techniques and pay particular attention to the quality of the sites of our network and our partners. All our anchors are varied, well-themed websites and rich content. By opting for a link on the NaddraBlog network, you are guaranteed to build a solid, quality link profile that will go below Google's radars. By trusting us for your netlinking campaign, you are guaranteed to have a large quantity of clean links, which protects you from negative SEO or the impact of spam.
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