Bad Backlinks Can Kill Your Rankings

Bad backlinks can harm your website. If you’ve identified bad backlinks, whether you’ve created it with a manipulative intent or innocently, you should know that it will only bring your website bad news. By now, SEO  companies understand the importance of quality backlinks. But, it seems that not everyone understands the danger they possess. 

When it comes to honest link building, there are a number of ways that it can be done. For example, through guest blogging, directory submission, press release distribution, community sites and blog commenting. However, with all of this, only high-quality and genuine links should be linked back to your website.  

Bad backlinks (ways to create free backlinks)can not only harm your website, it can also destroy your SEO ranking. And it may turn Google against you. Links can come from low-quality sites and spammy directories. If you’ve spent money on your link building campaign, you certainly don’t want to end up with bad backlinks. The best approach is to identify bad backlinks and get rid of them immediately.

It should be understood that it is far more productive for your website to have one high-quality link than several bad links, particularly if the websites you’ve received the links from do not contain any relevance to your site. There is a rule related to links that most websites follow, for example, a nofollow links indicates to Google that it should not be viewed as a recommendation. This rule will give you more control over your site and discourage spammy links being linked to your site. 

Back in 2012, Google introduced its Penguin Algorithm which made backlinks a critical part of your SEO. Previously, many sites boosted their online presence by using artificial and spammy links to manipulate Google. With Penguin, this manipulation all but stopped. Penguin update will immediately reduce the site’s SEO ranking upon discovering toxic and bad links on websites. If you are buying and selling links, you must put a nofollow tag, as otherwise Google can penalize your website for artificial link building methods.

It is possible to disavow bad links. The first step is to contact the websites that are linking to you and make a request to have their links removed manually. You cannot disavow links without making the request first. If the website owner refuses or ignores your request, you have no choice but to disavow the links. You can then create a disavow file of rejected links and upload to Google.

Once this step has been taken, your disavowed links will be assigned a nofollow tag and your search engine results will not be affected by any of this. The key takeaway in all of this is that bad links affect SEO ranking as mentioned above. It is crucial, therefore, to monitor your link building strategy and do it regularly. If you are making a genuine effort to build on your SEO strategy then remember that a few spammy links are enough to bring the entire thing down, and you don’t want that to happen.