Creating backlinks for your website is one of the important SEO activities that helps to increase search rankings, get quality traffic, and enhance trustworthiness of your website. Even if you have a great content read with keyword-rich metadata and optimized technical aspects, you will still need backlinks to attain traffic and rank.
However, backlinks can’t be just good as there are some toxic backlinks as well. These links affect your content’s relevancy, domain stats, and overall performance of the content. This blog post is all about helping your to check backlinks quality, importance of having them, and how to remove toxic backlinks from your website.
This is a really important topic that you should discover to optimize your SEO strategies and enhance your content’s credibility. Let’s get started:
What are Quality Backlinks?
Quality backlinks, or simply put good backlinks are the links which helps to rank your content on search engine result pages (SERPs). Moreover, these links provide quality traffic as trustworthy resource. As per Google’s guidelines, quality backlinks vary from low to high:
1. Low-quality backlinks: Generally, these links are considered to be spams or irrelevant sources to gain traffic on your website.
2. Medium-quality backlinks: Medium-quality backlinks are less strict in their requirements, making them simpler to acquire. However, the SEO boost they provide is also less significant.
3. High-quality backlinks: High-quality backlinks are the gold standard. Earning them involves stricter criteria, but they deliver the most significant impact on your website’s domain authority.
The necessity of building quality backlinks comes from maintaining the domain authority of the website with utmost priority.
Apart from quality backlinks, there are toxic backlinks as well that affect the content, pages, and overall website. Let’s get to know about them:
What are Toxic Backlinks?
Not all links pointing to your website are created equal. While some links can boost your search engine ranking and online visibility, others can actually drag you down. These harmful links are known as toxic backlinks, or bad backlinks.
Search engines like Google analyze the websites that link to yours to assess your own trustworthiness and authority. If your website primarily has backlinks from low-quality sites or websites that violate Google’s guidelines, it can be seen as a negative indicator.
There are several warning signs that can help you avoid these backlinks. These include links from websites that:
- Engaged in Link Swapping: These websites exchange links with each other solely for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, not because they offer any genuine value or connection.
- Used Link-Building Bots: These websites rely on automated programs to create a large number of spammy links across the internet. These tactics are easily detectable by Google and can hurt your reputation.
- Have Low Authority Themselves: Backlinks from websites with low domain authority offer little to no benefit to your own ranking.
- Utilized a Private Blog Network (PBN): These are networks of websites created specifically for the purpose of building links to other websites. Google frowns upon PBNs as they’re considered a manipulative strategy.
- Purchased for Link Building: Buying backlinks is a clear violation of Google’s guidelines and can be easily identified.
- Penalized by Google: To discourage manipulative link-building practices, Google has various policies and systems in place. While some toxic backlinks might be ignored or “devalued,” having a large number of them can trigger a manual penalty from Google. This penalty can significantly hurt your website’s search ranking.
Focus on building high-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant websites. This will not only improve your website’s credibility in the eyes of search engines but also attract genuine visitors interested in your content.
How to Check Backlinks Quality?
Backlink analysis is crucial to check whether the backlinks attain are of high-quality or toxic ones. To check them, here are certain important tips you should follow:
1. Audit Links for Website Relevancy
The relevancy of the website matters a lot. You should check websites for backlinks that covers same topics or follow the same industry as yours. If this factor differs then users visiting those websites might not find your link relevant or natural.
Website’s relevancy plays a major role in passing the link juice to your targeted content. More often, it will benefit your site’s authority and help to boost search rankings. So, make sure that the website uploads content that is specific to your targeted niche.
2. Check the Authority of the Referring Domain
Referring domain means the websites that offer backlinks opportunities. Their authority also plays an important role in auditing backlinks quality. In the world of SEO, domain authority (DA) or domain rating (DR) is an indicator that shows how preferable a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Websites having higher DA has greater chances to become visible on higher positions. And hence, these websites receive higher organic clicks as well. If the backlinks are created from these referring domains then they can be counted as quality backlinks.
DA score ranges from 1-100, and websites having DA more than 50 are considered to be genuine domains for building backlinks.
3. Audit the Traffic of Referring Domain
Traffic is another crucial aspect that you should measure to audit backlinks quality. It tells about the visitors coming from referring domains and estimate the clicks you got through that specific backlink.
Moreover, the traffic coming from referring domain should be consistent as fluctuations may affect the affect authority of that backlink. The more traffic you get from these backlinks, the higher the chance of getting new clicks on your website.
4. Check the Anchor Text
Anchor text is a phrase of a group of words on which you can insert a hyperlink. Even if it is a small factor but checking the anchor text to analyze backlink quality is also important. Search engines like Google crawl these texts to check if the hyperlink matches the context of the targeted URL or not.
If you hyperlink an irrelevant anchor text related to the targeted page’s URL then crawlers as well as users will consider them irrelevant – affecting your backlink’s quality. Once good practice to use anchor text is to hyperlink the keyword (if appearing in the content) or its variation to the targeted URL that matches the anchor text.
5. Look for Spam Score
Spam score of the website is another most important factor to check backlink quality. According to Google’s guidelines, backlinks created from spammy websites can affect your website’s authority, bounce rate and increase spam score as well.
Websites with spam score even higher than 10 can affect your content’s spam score. So, you might get penalized from taking backlinks from these websites.
How to remove toxic backlinks?
There are several steps to remove backlinks from your website. You should follow them consistently to ensure that your website become toxic-free:
1. Collect Data for Toxic Links
The initial step involves identifying the problematic links pointing to your website. Utilize industry-standard backlink analysis tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to compile a complete list of backlinks. These tools allow you to filter and assess backlinks based on various metrics, including domain authority, spam score, anchor text relevance, and thematic alignment.
Red flags indicating potentially toxic backlinks include links originating from low-quality domains, those containing unnatural or overly-optimized anchor texts, links irrelevant to your niche, or those suspected to be part of a link scheme.
2. Analyze and Prioritize Toxic Links
Once you have identified toxic backlinks, a thorough analysis of their impact on your website is crucial. Evaluate factors like the number and percentage of toxic backlinks, the pages they link to, the targeted keywords, and any observed changes in traffic and ranking.
Analyzing your backlink profile against your competitors can also reveal unnatural or suspicious patterns. This combined assessment helps prioritize the most detrimental links and streamline the removal process.
3. Request for Removal of Toxic Backlinks
Following the analysis, it’s recommended to reach out to the website owners or webmasters where the detrimental backlinks reside. The objective is to request the removal of these problematic links. Your communication should clearly specify the exact location of the backlink you wish to be deleted.
It’s also helpful to explain why these links are considered detrimental and provide the specific URLs for reference. Maintaining a record of your outreach efforts and tracking whether the webmasters comply with your request is essential.
Consider sending a follow-up email if you don’t receive a response within a reasonable time frame, such as 8-10 days.
4. Disavow toxic links
The final step is to disavow the remaining toxic backlinks. Disavowing essentially instructs Google to disregard these links when evaluating your website’s authority. This process involves creating a text file listing the specific domains or URLs you want disavowed and uploading it to the Google Disavow Tool within Google Search Console.
Exercising caution is paramount when using the disavow tool – ensure you only disavow links definitively identified as toxic, as this action can potentially affect your ranking and website traffic.
Use RanksPro Tool to Analyze Backlinks Quality
A strong backlink profile is a cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy. By understanding the difference between quality and toxic backlinks, you can attract valuable links that boost your website’s credibility and search ranking. Remember, quality backlinks come naturally from relevant and authoritative websites that share your content or reference your expertise.
Conversely, toxic backlinks can harm your website’s reputation and potentially trigger penalties from search engines.
Now that you’re equipped with this knowledge, it’s crucial to regularly monitor your backlink profile and act when necessary. Fortunately, tools like RanksPro can simplify your work as it offers a great feature – Backlink Checker.
RanksPro offer this comprehensive backlink audit feature that empowers businesses to:
- Identify high-quality backlinks: Analyze metrics like domain authority, anchor text distribution, and referring website relevance to discover valuable links that enhance your SEO performance.
- Uncover toxic backlinks: With advanced filtering options, RanksPro SEO helps you pinpoint low-authority domains, spammy anchor texts, and unnatural link patterns that might be harming your website.
- Streamline backlink removal: Generate disavow files directly within the tool, making the process of requesting or disavowing toxic backlinks more effici
By leveraging RanksPro SEO’s backlink management features, businesses can proactively build a healthy backlink profile, improve their search engine ranking, and ultimately achieve their digital marketing goals.
