It can be a dismaying discovery to see your website languishing way behind others even after implementing SEO in copybook style. If creating relevant, engaging, and original content infused with the right keywords, making your site navigation easy and intuitive, ensuring the site loads fast, etc. are not working to get you on Page One of Google search results; the culprit possibly is the quality of backlinks. While it can seem unfair that a single issue can spoil the fun, the good thing is that you can analyze the backlinks to detect the ones not working in your favor.
Understanding Backlinks
Backlinks, also called inbound links, connect your website to others. When other websites find your content relevant and interesting to their audiences, they may include a link to your website on their pages. These links that drive traffic from other sites to yours act to establish authority and credibility to search engines endeavoring to fulfill search intent with the best quality information.
The larger the number of websites linking to your website’s page, the more the search engine’s confidence about the page quality. When a search engine thinks your page is valuable, it will drive it up in the search results. For this reason, link building is a vital aspect of SEO optimization company.
Traits of Good Backlinks
Good backlinks are those that help you to achieve better search engine rankings. They will be from authoritative sites, and you can take advantage of their reputation or domain authority. However, you must be careful as not all sites have authority. Links from spammy sites or sites with thin content can drive your ranking down.
Another characteristic of good backlinks is they include your target keyword in the anchor text. Accurate and concise anchor text with your keyword included gives the search engines a better idea of the content of your page.
Generally, good backlinks link sites related to the content of your webpage. Google prefers to seek out supplemental information that adds value to fulfilling the search intent, which is why it gives more importance to related sites. Links by unrelated sites may damage your ranking.
You must also make sure that all good backlinks are marked as “dofollow” to help search engine crawlers to track them from one site to another. Conversely, if you mark links as “nofollow”, search engines will ignore them. However, even then, the mention of your site acts to give your brand more visibility.
Toxic Backlinks
You need to avoid toxic backlinks because they hurt your authority and reputation as far as Google is concerned. Many of these types of links originate from the time search engines went by the number of links, not their quality, for ranking. However, Google has since then cracked down on these black hat tactics and penalized sites by driving them down the rankings.
Typically, toxic backlinks emanate from spammy sites that deal with nothing in particular and especially nothing related to you. In addition to being plain annoying, these backlinks can damage your rankings even though it is not something you did deliberately. The problem is that you may not be aware of spammy sites backlinking to you unless you specifically conduct a test.
Another thing you need to avoid is buying paid backlinks because most of the time, the links are not from sites with any relevance or authority and may instead end up damaging your SEO. The days are long gone when the number of backlinks had any bearing on its credibility and authority. Today, participating in these link exchange programs can get you penalized by Google. Many of the toxic backlinks come from blogs comments or forums.
However, you don’t need to avoid all backlinks from these sources as many of them are high-quality sites with a large population of users and relevant content. However, you must be on guard from low-quality links from discussion forums because you need to disavow them before your ranking goes for a toss. The backlinks need to be visible and adhere to Google’s policies if you don’t want to be penalized for actions of unscrupulous webmasters trying to beat search engines by hiding the backlinks. Google also frowns on the purchase of links.
Checking and Removing Spammy Backlinks
To judge if a backlink is liable to hurt your SEO, you need to ask yourself whether the link is relevant to your website and what your audience is looking for, and if the link can help generate legitimate traffic to your website. You should also ask yourself if the link has any other useful purpose apart from SEO. In case, the answer is negative to any of the questions, it is best to take action to remove it.
If Google has taken manual action against your website or if you think you may get one in the future, you could ask the different site owners to remove the links, but in all likelihood, you will not get a response. According to Social Media Today, in such a case, you should take steps to disavow the backlinks. Even though the links remain on the other sites, disavowing the links instructs Google to ignore them to rank your site. It is advisable to conduct regular link audits to identify problem backlinks. While you can use quite a few backlink checker tools, you need to proceed with caution because you don’t want to disavow a useful backlink.
Conclusion
Spammy backlinks can cause your page ranking to drop and may invite manual action by Google if you have violated their guidelines. You need to take a hard look at the spammy links to your website and decide whether to undertake the process of disavowing them. It is also important to understand that the process of disavowing backlinks is not an SEO strategy by itself although it can help your rankings.
However, if you are facing manual action by Google, you must disavow the identified links. While Google is continually cracking down on spammy links and prevent them from negatively affecting SEO, you will do well to conduct periodic website backlink audits and remove them, either by requesting the webmasters or by disavowing them.
