Guide to BackLinks – Chapter Five: Bad Links

What kinds of links to avoid

Obviously before you jump into your link building campaign with both feet you need to know what kinds of links to avoid according to Google’s webmaster guidelines. According to those guidelines, Google sees the following kinds of backlinks as unnatural, meaning that they leave you vulnerable to penalties.

Advertorials

Sponsored posts and any other kind of advertorials with backlinks that are not no-follows are against Google’s guidelines.

Anchor text distribution issues

Repeating the same keywords too much in your backlinks is an easy way to get penalized, so avoid this. Refer back to Chapter Three for more on this subject.

Any backlink designed to manipulate PageRank

Obviously all of Google’s guidelines go back to this core issue. Google wants its search engine rankings to be free from manipulation.

Article directories

These websites aren’t useful, and links to them can hurt your site.

Automatically generated backlinks

Automatically generated backlinks are one of the fastest ways to get penalized. Avoid any such back linking traps. And remember, every single “deal” that offers lots of backlinks for a small fee is selling automatically generated backlinks, which means it’s not a deal at all.

Bookmark websites

This is another shade of automated linking and you should avoid it.

Comment spam

Comment spam is typically automated and mostly plagues sites that don’t moderate comments. The thing about this kind of spam is that if you aren’t vigilant you may miss it on your own site, and because it’s automated it creates big, obvious patterns for Google to notice. (It’s worth noting again that making intelligent, valuable comments on posts in your niche can be, as discussed in earlier chapters, a great link building strategy.)

Making intelligent, valuable comments on posts in your niche can be a great link building strategy.

Duplicate and spun content sites

Google’s goal is to produce search results that provide real value to users. For this reason, they encourage webmasters to create content that is useful and unique. They also devalue content that is duplicative and poor quality, and spun content is both.

Foreign language websites

If your English language website has countless backlinks from sites in China, India, or Russia, Google could be suspicious. Because relevancy matters so much, you should beware of this kind of pattern. Look for .ru and .cn sites in particular, and make sure all foreign language sites you link to are authoritative. Now, it is important to note foreign language links are total fine, if they are natural.

However, often they are not.

Forum spam

There are great ways to use forums to build legitimate traffic, but like everything else, forums can be abused. Forum spam includes the creation of multiple profiles just to include links in them, and of course actual forum posts with links in them. Avoid these spammy forum behaviors.

Hacked or hidden links in code

Avoid this extremely risky tactic. Search engines are getting more sophisticated every day, and you will certainly be caught eventually (not to mention that this is at least bad manners and at worst unethical).

I have seen this happen many times and cleaned up plenty of sites with this type of hack.

Automated Script Spam Found by Search Engine Watch

Irrelevant backlinks

No matter what the context is, your backlinks must always be relevant, and Google’s algorithm can tell the difference.

Link exchanges

This old school method has been on Google’s radar for awhile. An occasional link exchange between professionals whose sites share a niche is probably of no concern. But lots of link exchanges between unrelated sites is a problem likely to draw a penalty.

Low quality backlinks

As a general rule, the simpler it is to get a backlink, the less value it probably has. Make valuing quality over quantity part of your backlinking strategy and it will fit right in with Google’s algorithms.

Low-quality guest posting

We got into a lot of detail about guest posting in Chapter Four, so I won’t revisit the details here. Suffice it to say that although quality guest blogging is still valuable and safe, spammy guest posting will get your site penalized. Make sure your guest posting activities are limited to sites in your niche with great authority, and be vigilant about using mostly branded anchor links.

Low quality web directories

If you’re actually still doing this, stop. The most popular directories like Best of the Web, Dmoz or niche directories may be worth a small amount of your time, but none of the lesser directories are and the tactic shouldn’t be part of your strategy.

Paid backlinks that affect PageRank

Google doesn’t penalize all paid links—just those that are not natural or editorial and are intended to influence PageRank. It is Google’s position that paid links should not be used to pass PageRank, whether they’re in images or text.

For this reason, include the rel=”nofollow” attribute in all paid links (if you use them). It also pays to avoid what Google sees as red flags for this kind of paid backlink, including links from unrelated content and sites, sitewide anchor text links, and links from obviously problematic pages like those branded “sponsored post.”

Private blog networks

Since 2012 Google has been penalizing private blog networks and sites that link back to them.

Many people continue to attempt private blog networks because they think it seems easier than actual content marketing and outreach, but this isn’t the case—and creating high-quality, linkable content doesn’t carry the same risk, either.

The bottom line is that backlinks from blog networks on your site put you in danger of being penalized, and this trend is likely to become a permanent feature of the algorithm.

Sitewide backlinks

If you plaster every page of your site with backlinks from blog footers and sidebars you’re guaranteeing that many of them won’t be relevant. You’re therefore ensuring a spammy look in a search engine’s eyes.

Also, global backlinks can trigger a penguin penalty.

Spammy, questionable, and hacked sites

You already know you should mostly stick to back linking with sites in your niche. You should also avoid high risk sites like link farms, hacked sites, and porn sites entirely.

Widget backlinks

Widgets are a useful tool, but if you use them for link building, make them optional by including rel= “nofollow” in them. This way your followers and fans can embed your badge or plugin without automatically linking. You can certainly ask them to link back to you and you should, but it’s the automatic part that Google doesn’t like.

Bad link penalties

So, you’ve been hit with a penalty and your traffic has taken a nosedive. There are a few things to keep in mind as you start the long climb back up.

Expect to recover around 60 to 70 percent of the traffic you used to have.

Your old level of traffic was influenced by bad linking tactics, so you’re going to see something different this time around. Now you’re going to need to not only clean up the problems on your site, but also build a solid bedrock of authoritative, natural backlinks to recover.

Before you do that, learn about all the types of penalties.

Identifying and removing bad links

Now that you’ve seen which links to avoid, it’s time to take action and apply this knowledge to your own site. These are the steps you should take.

Audit your link profile

Use a software tool such as Link Detox to audit your link profile.

There are many more as well. Such as the Moz Spam Analysis tool, Majestic and Ahrefs.

Whatever tool you choose, use it to identify the bad links and organize them. You can learn more about this process in my article on Search Engine Land.

Here is what I said there:

Remove bad links

Once you’ve accessed the information you need you should have a good idea of how much risk you face and which links you need to remove. Outreach to the owners of the sites you’re unwillingly linked to is your first step. I use Rmoov for this.

Email the webmasters explaining who you are and what you are hoping to achieve, explaining that you want the link to their site removed. Give them the specific details of the page and URL. Be polite and professional.

If you get no response from your outreach efforts, the next step is to disavow the link using Google’s disavow tool. Note that Google demands that you attempt outreach first, so don’t skip that step. If you have numerous harmful links from the same site, just disavow the entire domain. Remember, each time you upload a new disavow file your older file is erased; this means you need to include all of your old disavowed links in your new file.

Read these posts before you start.

Tools for finding and overcoming bad links

Here is a quick list of some of the tools I like.

Ahrefs

This link analysis tool allows you to sort backlinks based on either Ahrefs rank (domain authority) or anchor texts. Ahrefs also offers filters which allow you to parse out nofollow, sitewide, and regular links. Use Ahrefs to check a link’s integrity, show all new links, and track your site’s recent traffic gains and losses. Ahrefs also has a disavow tool that you can use by syncing with your webmaster account. (You still need to take corrective action and conduct outreach first.)

BuzzStream

BuzzStream is really an outreach tool which lets you send link removal requests more efficiently. It allows you to record your targets, send emails using templates which are customizable, and monitor all responses to your requests.

Don’t be afraid to reach out and get your bad links removed using BuzzStream.

Link Detox

This tool is especially useful after you’ve already been penalized because it helps you to maintain a healthy link profile. It offers you an amalgamated risk score for each backlink using 22 data sources and classifies links as healthy, suspicious, or toxic.

Majestic

Majestic shows you details about your site’s traffic, conduct regular link audits, and perform a competitor link analysis. After plugging your URL into the tool it generates a backlink history chart and page-level analysis. The most important numbers you get from this tool are citation flow, their term for link juice, and trust flow, determined by the authority of link sources.

Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History

As I mentioned earlier, you can use this to match dates in your traffic drop to Google algorithmic update announcements to determine if you’ve been penalized.

Rmoov

This tool is designed to make link removal outreach via email scalable and efficient. After you have created your list of bad links, Rmoov pulls contact information for each site’s owner and sends both automated removal requests which may be customized and follow up messages. It keeps track of links that have been dealt with and generates a disavow tool after the outreach step is over.

Remove’em

This works much like Rmoov, except it also generates the list of bad links by collating links from Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, and Moz. After that it generates removal requests, follows up, and produces a report. Unlike Rmoov, Remove’em does not automatically create a disavow tool; when it is done you must take this step.

SEO SpyGlass

SEO SpyGlass lets you find the backlinks of any website and determine its PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank. It helps you to detect inappropriate anchor text backlinks, number of homepage links, and irrelevant links. You can also use SEO SpyGlass to see which of your inbound links (or those of your competitors) are coming from forums and blogs to identify major traffic sources.

WebMeUp Backlink Checker

This free tool has a smaller link index than Ahrefs and Majestic, but it is easy to use and is still a fairly comprehensive option. It provides you with visual charts of your link profile you can use to check for toxic links.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we explored what kinds of links to avoid and why, how Google penalizes sites, how to take corrective action after a penalty, and what some of the better tools for finding and overcoming bad links are.

Even after your links are cleaned up, make sure you are checking Google Search Console weekly. Your competitors could be doing negative SEO or the SEO company you are using could be black hat.

In the next chapter we move on to email outreach and link building.