Link-building is a crucial SEO tactic when you’re trying to boost your visibility and see your website placed at the top of the results page on search engines.
Good backlinks are obtained with intense marketing efforts. When done right, link-building can increase the authority of your website and pages and bring you closer to success. But as great as it can be as a strategy, link-building can also be harmful to you if you don’t do it right.
Sometimes, website owners learn about link-building without studying it carefully enough to build a strong strategy. They don’t always reach out to a link insertion service that can help them, preferring to do everything themselves. In some cases, this leads to a flawed link-building strategy. How do you know if your methods are bad so you can change them? This post will tell you everything you need to know on the matter.
Why Are Bad Backlinks So Hurtful for Your Rankings?
Lots of websites focus on getting a myriad of backlinks. Link-building is great, because it can bring you benefits such as increased traffic and reputation. But in some cases, sites focus more on quantity rather than quality, then end up being surprised when they see their traffic plummeting.
Although having more backlinks sounds great on paper, in reality you also have to pay attention to the quality of these links. Bad links can have the opposite effect to what you’re aiming for. This is all because Google became aware of how some platforms began to abuse link-building, using link spam to push their pages in front of everyone else on the search engine. Google introduced a new algorithm back in 2012 that was meant to decrease the effectiveness of link-building schemes.
The platform is known as Penguin. Over time, it has increased more and more, becoming an integral part of its algorithm thanks to its ability to find spam links. You have no chance to hide, because Penguin will immediately know when a lot of bad websites link back to your platform. It will just end up lowering your organic search rankings.
Here are some reasons why bad backlinks can be such an issue for you:
- They will waste your resources
- You will notice your search engine rankings decreasing
- Your site’s reputation will be damaged
- Google may penalize you
What Exactly Is Classified As a Bad Link?
Bad links can be many things. These backlinks are meant to send people to your site, but they actually have the opposite effect, not only due to the bad quality of the platform that added the link but also due to its effect on your search engine rankings. Generally, bad links come from a spammy website.
Here are a few characteristics that make a backlink bad:
- It comes from a low-quality platform
- The placement on PBNs was paid
- The placement is reciprocal
- The anchor text is stuffed with keywords
- It was bought in order to manipulate SERPs
How Do You Find Bad Backlinks?
There are many ways to find out if your link-building strategy is flawed. Sometimes, it only takes checking the links in the content manually, but in other cases, you may need to take extra steps to make sure you locate the problematic parts and fix them. Here is how to find bad backlinks:
Try a Backlink Checker
You now have the opportunity to find bad backlinks very easily with the help of a bad backlink checker. These checkers can either be free or paid, and they bring you a few benefits. One of them is, obviously, saving you a lot of time by discovering the problematic links more quickly. Furthermore, these apps can also find various types of bad links and different degrees of toxicity, from the most toxic ones to the least toxic ones.
Search for Bad Backlinks Manually
Another thing you can do is, obviously, looking for bad backlinks manually. This lets you go through each backlink yourself, analyzing it carefully and understanding exactly why it failed to bring positive results. Now, keep in mind that this method is more time-consuming, but it can also lead to more accurate results as long as you have the right knowledge.
Go to the Google Search Console and go to “Links”, then click on “MORE” from the “Top linking sites” area. It will show you all the sites that link back to your website.
Check the Writing Quality
One way to tell that the backlink quality is bad is by verifying how good or bad the writing on that particular platform is. If the content is poorly-written, includes grammatical errors, and includes irrelevant information or badly-organized content, it’s a sign that this link is not something that benefits your site. Lots of bad sites will excessively add keywords to their texts and will not do a good job at bringing evidence for their claims.
Pay Attention to the Domain
Believe it or not, even the domain name can be a red flag in some cases, and it’s crucial to understand when it’s time to be alarmed. While sites with a great authority are easy to recognize, a domain that combines a bunch of random letters and numbers won’t be considered a trustworthy platform. In fact, Google will see it as a low-quality or spammy website, and so should you.
This is because these domains often copy content from other sources and they have no clear company or brand name. After all, it’s pretty clear from the lack of interest in finding a suitable domain name. More often than not, these sites also include a wide range of outbound links, which decrease how valuable your website’s link is.
Final Thoughts
Your link-building strategy may be flawed without you even knowing about it. This is why you should immediately check your backlinks and make sure they are not bad. Check the domain name and the writing quality. You can also choose whether to verify backlinks manually or automatically with the help of special tools. Once you find bad links, you can start to fix them.
Read more:
Is Your Link-Building Strategy Flawed? Here’s How to Find Out