What Are Bad Backlinks? (Answered)
In this article, we will answer the question, “What are bad backlinks?”
In addition to the definition of bad backlinks, we’ll also cover the most common types of bad backlinks in search engine optimization (SEO) and give tips on how to remove them from your website’s link profile.
This short, but informative guide will help you understand the basics of bad links in SEO so you can work to eliminate them from your site to improve ranking and traffic to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. .
What are bad backlinks?
Bad backlinks are links that come from an untrusted website and too many bad backlinks can hurt your ranking in search engines. If the algorithm detects that you have used unnatural or questionable means to obtain those links, your site may be penalized or deindexed.
Types of bad backlinks
There are two primary ways to find bad backlinks:
Finding Bad Backlinks
There are five steps to remove bad backlinks from your website’s link profile.
Check out the full guide on How to Remove Bad Backlinks to learn more about each step so you can clean up any bad backlinks pointing to your site.
- Links to low quality directories or forums.
- Links to spun material published on other websites.
- Links created through link exchanges.
- Links created through 301 redirects can be labeled as bad toxic links.
- High amount of links with exact match keyword anchor text.
- Links inside blogs are commented with keyword-rich anchor text.
- Links to websites that are not in Google’s index.
- Links to other sites created by you for the sole purpose of creating backlinks.
Remove bad backlinks from your website
I hope you enjoy this guide answering the question about bad backlinks.
As you found out, bad links come in different types and are usually any backlinks you bought or acquired through unnatural means to manipulate search engine rankings for a website.
If you have created bad backlinks for SEO purposes or have discovered a large number of poor-quality links in your website’s backlink profile, you should try to remove them to protect the integrity of your site.
- Google Search Console: It is a manual and free process. Go to the “Links Report” section and then click the “Top Linking Sites” box to get a complete report of websites linking to your property. Then, inspect each site one by one to see if it looks like a bad link.
- SEO Backlink Audit Tool: This is an automated process that requires payment for software such as Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush. Each of these SEO tools has a feature that flags links that fit their metrics as bad backlinks that you want to get rid of.
