One of the best ways to boost your site’s SEO ranking is through backlinks. These are links from other websites to your site. When Google first began as a search engine, backlinks were a major method used in determining type of content on the site, as well as, the popularity of the website. While Google’s algorithm has changed over the years, there is still an importance placed on backlinks. The only difference is the types of backlinks.

A website can have bad backlinks or low quality backlinks. These are links that are not relevant to your website or are coming from link farms. Often this comes from hiring a fly by night SEO company that quickly boosts your SEO Rankings only to have you penalized on Google’s next algorithm update. In essence, you get a short-term win but a huge backfire in the end.

So how do you identify bad backlinks? Well there are several ways. One is to hire a firm such as Site Ascension to perform a backlink audit check.   Another is to buy software such as Raven, Cognitive SEO, or Majestic SEO to scan for your backlink profile.

How Do You Identify Bad Backlinks?

Here is a quick rundown of bad backlinks:

Links From Foreign Sites – If you have links from sites in countries that you do not do business in, this is often an indicator of a Spam Link. If you have links from websites in Russia while you do tax work in Houston, Texas, you can see how this is an unnatural link.

Links From the Comments Section of Websites –  This is very popular among backlink spam artists. Often populating in random blog articles comments section, there will be text like “Great Article” or “Wonderful insight” followed by a link to a website. These are looked upon as bad backlinks. There is no relevant information. Comment backlinks are bad for your websites profile.

Overly Optimized Anchor Texts – Mostly when linking to your site, the URL itself is used as the link. Links that overly use exact keywords seem very suspicious. Your backlink should really be just your URL or main theme.

Getting Rid Of Bad Backlinks

Once you have identified what sites have bad links leading back to your website, you need to get rid of them. The question is how?

• An easy method is to contact the website owner and ask for the links to be removed. Remember to be nice about it, demanding often doesn’t get you far. Sometimes you will be encountered with having to pay to remove the links.
• If the bad backlinks are to low quality score or low ranking pages you can just delete the page. This will cause a 404 error, which you do not want a lot of, but if it’s just a couple then that is fine.
• If you can’t get the links removed either way, then it is time to use Google’s disavow tool to disassociate your website from the bad links.

As always if you have any questions or comments, just comment below or send us an email and we will answer as soon as possible.