That last one is clearly not like the other two, is it? It raises a few questions you probably want answered now. Let’s not keep you waiting.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Q: What does “dangerous” mean?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
A:<\/strong> Google used to penalize sites for having too many low-quality backlinks, even going so far as to remove them from its index and prevent them from showing up in search results. That doesn’t happen anymore<\/a>. These days, Google Penguin (the link-evaluating update to Google\u2019s algorithm) does little more than devalue those backlinks. The result is a lot less dramatic: a mere drop in site rankings.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Q: Why are such backlinks dangerous in the first place? What does Google have against them?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
A:<\/strong> Backlinks mean that someone voted your site as an authority. If that was all there was to it, everybody would be gaming the system with sheer numbers of links (and that’s indeed how it was at the dawn of SEO). Google realized that quality trumps over quantity and made the votes unequal – in a meritocracy-like way.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why there\u2019s a difference between a site which has proven its worth over time and a site which has not (or one that has even proved the opposite). A vote from the former carries more weight than a vote from the latter. Now, if you keep collecting \u201cbad\u201d votes, what does that speak of you?<\/p>\n
So the obvious takeaway is: if you want your link building activities to bear fruit, build as many good backlinks as you can while gaining as few bad ones as possible (preferably zero). But what are you to do if you\u2019ve already collected too many bad backlinks?<\/p>\n
Then you have some cleaning up to do.<\/p>\n
<\/span>How to find bad backlinks<\/span><\/h2>\n
Undesirable backlinks generally come from three sources:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Dubious, unauthoritative sites<\/li>\n
- Sites thematically unrelated to yours<\/li>\n
- Spam<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The bad part is, 99% of the time you aren’t the one creating backlinks. Other people do it, and you have little to no control over what backlinks you are getting. It’s therefore an easy job for a nasty competitor to use shady backlinks to pollute your link profile and cause your rankings to take a nosedive. This is called \u201cnegative SEO.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fortunately, there\u2019s a way to prevent that. All you need are SEO tools – namely, a toxic link checker.<\/p>\n
Step one<\/strong> is to check your site for bad backlinks. For that, you can use WebCEO\u2019s Toxic Backlink Checker Tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n
It’s easy as pie. If it’s your first time using the tool, it will scan your site automatically once you open it. Otherwise, you’ll just need to click the part saying Scanned X days ago<\/span> (or Scanned today<\/span>) and then Rescan<\/span>. Now take a moment to sit back and relax until the tool finishes doing its job.<\/p>\n
When it’s done, Toxic Pages will display a table with the most suspicious linking sites. This is how the tool evaluates them:<\/p>\n
- \n
- URL trust level and Domain trust level.<\/strong> These are metrics provided by Majestic and are very similar to Moz’s Page and Domain Authority. Low numbers (below 0.5) indicate potentially harmful backlinks. Emphasis on “potentially”: good low-authority sites do exist, such as new websites that just haven’t made a name for themselves yet.<\/li>\n
- Total number of outgoing links on the page.<\/strong> Unless you are Wikipedia, chances are, you can’t point to a big number of external domains from the same page at once without looking like a link farm. This only applies to dofollow links, though.<\/li>\n
- Number of backlinks pointing to the same domain.<\/strong> Same reason as above.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
If you want to change how the tool should evaluate backlinks, click on the Settings button or on Configure toxicity factors<\/span> at the top of the screen. Other than configuring the factors listed above, here are a couple more things you can do:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Tell the tool which links it should consider toxic and which ones it shouldn\u2019t. That is, if you are confident your own preferences will be more accurate than the default settings.<\/li>\n
- Automatically label links from specific domains as toxic. The reverse is true, as well.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Lastly, you can also manually mark URLs in the report as non-toxic. Such URLs will be moved to the Pages manually marked as non-toxic<\/span> report and stay there in case you decide to change your mind.<\/p>\n
<\/span>How to remove bad backlinks<\/span><\/h2>\n
Okay, scanning is over and you have a list of offending backlinks. What’s the next step?<\/p>\n
Getting rid of them, of course.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Remove them manually.<\/strong> If you can edit those websites’ content yourself, the backlinks there will be an easy target.<\/li>\n
- Contact the person who can remove those backlinks.<\/strong> This method is tricky because it can fail in so many ways. Maybe there’s no “contact me” section, maybe the person won’t receive your message or just won’t listen or care. But if it works, then you’re golden.<\/li>\n
- Disavow those backlinks.<\/strong> You can just ask Google to not consider these specific undesirable backlinks as part of your link profile. There are two ways to do it: with the help of Google Search Console or right in WebCEO’s Toxic Pages tool.<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/span>How to disavow backlinks in Google Search Console<\/span><\/h3>\n
We\u2019ll assume you have already created a Gmail account and registered your site as your property in Google Search Console. Let\u2019s jump straight to disavowing backlinks.<\/p>\n
First, you will need to create a .txt file with the links you want to disavow. In this file, you can list individual pages or entire domains.<\/p>\n
- \n
- For individual pages, simply put their full URLs (e.g. https:\/\/example.com\/page<\/span>).<\/li>\n
- Domains are described in this format: domain:example.com<\/span>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
- Contact the person who can remove those backlinks.<\/strong> This method is tricky because it can fail in so many ways. Maybe there’s no “contact me” section, maybe the person won’t receive your message or just won’t listen or care. But if it works, then you’re golden.<\/li>\n
- Remove them manually.<\/strong> If you can edit those websites’ content yourself, the backlinks there will be an easy target.<\/li>\n
- Total number of outgoing links on the page.<\/strong> Unless you are Wikipedia, chances are, you can’t point to a big number of external domains from the same page at once without looking like a link farm. This only applies to dofollow links, though.<\/li>\n
- URL trust level and Domain trust level.<\/strong> These are metrics provided by Majestic and are very similar to Moz’s Page and Domain Authority. Low numbers (below 0.5) indicate potentially harmful backlinks. Emphasis on “potentially”: good low-authority sites do exist, such as new websites that just haven’t made a name for themselves yet.<\/li>\n
- Q: Why are such backlinks dangerous in the first place? What does Google have against them?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
![\"How](\"https:\/\/site.wstatic.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/how-to-disavow-links-google-1.png\")
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