How to Find and Remove Toxic Backlinks from Your Site

Backlinks are important to Mississippi SEO because they tell the search engines that your content is valuable. If lots of websites link back to yours, the search engines are more likely to recommend your content to others, improving search rankings and visibility. But not all backlinks are created equal. Just as there are “good” backlinks, there are “bad” backlinks, too.

Let’s learn more about bad backlinks, how they can negatively impact SEO and how to get rid of them. For more clarification on this matter, contact WSI Star Web Solutions – we’ll be happy to help!

What are Toxic Backlinks?

Backlinks that come from trustworthy sites with high authority are best. They tell the search engines that they vote for your content. Even no-follow links from a strong site can boost rankings and Mississippi SEO.

Unfortunately, not all links come from trustworthy sites. Some come from sites that are spammy or low authority, and these can harm your site and decrease your rankings. Most toxic backlinks come from:

• Spam sites and sites only created for link building
• Sites not indexed by Google
• Sites with a virus or malware
• Link networks

How Bad Backlinks Affect Your Site

If you get penalized for having toxic backlinks, your site will decrease in the rankings. This makes it harder for people to find your content. And, if the penalties are bad enough, your site could be removed from the index altogether.

There are two ways you can get penalties. The first is from the Google algorithm that automatically applies a penalty when they see a bad link. The second is from Google’s own team that monitors websites and penalizes them for having toxic links. Roughly 400,000 manual actions are performed each month.

When your site is penalized, the consequences can be devastating. You can lose organic traffic, search visibility, traffic and revenue. This is why it’s important to follow the best practices, monitor your site on a regular basis and request recommendations for manual penalties.

Finding and Removing Toxic Backlinks

The best way to recover from link penalties is by improving your site’s overall link profile. Here are some steps for doing this.

• Identify toxic links. Use a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs to identify toxic links.
• Request the link be removed. You can contact the administrator of the linking site and ask them to remove the link.
• Ask for a review. If the link is valid, you can request a review from Google. This could take up to a month.
• Use the disavow tool. If the link isn’t important to you, use the disavow tool to remove it.

Backlinks are an important part of having a credible, trustworthy site. Just make sure that your backlinks are high in quality and follow Google’s rules. For a comprehensive link review of your website, contact WSI Star Web Solutions today.