1. Toxic backlinks come from spam sites
Most people are smart enough to know that the Nigerian prince really doesn’t want to give away $10 million, but is it wise to notice spammy backlinks?
There are entire websites dedicated to selling illegal or irrelevant products, and these sites are usually filled with spammy backlinks.
Not only are these annoying, they can be downright harmful to your website.
Too many backlinks from spam sites can lead to penalties from search engines.
In fact, many times you don’t even realize that spam sites link to your website.
That’s why it’s important to always keep an eye out for bad backlinks like spam.
2. Paid link mills often generate toxic backlinks
Paid linking schemes have been around almost as long as search engines since the first time someone noticed that backlinks contributed to rankings.
How the paid link scheme works is straightforward. Links are sold alone or as part of a package, providing backlinks to site owners looking for a quick way to skyrocket their rankings.
However, search engines are aware of this tactic.
These link exchanges are in explicit violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines, as we don’t want only those who buy the most backlinks to get top search engine results.
As soon as search engines discover a new link mill, they start penalizing sites using it.
3. Toxic backlinks can come from forum and blog comment links (especially foreign ones)
Not all forum links are bad.
Anything from a quality site with established users and relevant content is beneficial.
However, like the linkmills, when you have hundreds of poor quality links coming from foreign discussion forums, you should disavow them before they damage the rankings you’ve worked so hard to create.
4. Harmful backlinks can be hidden
Possibly the first black hat SEO tactic developed, malicious webmasters still try to disrespect search engines by hiding backlinks that sound exactly like that.
Backlinks are hidden from users and search engines by using text manipulation, background colors, or other means.
This is a clear violation of Google’s policy.
It’s important to ensure that links back to your site are clear, viewable, and compliant with Google’s policies.
5. Paid or sponsored links that pass PageRank are toxic
Another backlink prohibition is passing PageRank on to ad buyers.
Buying and selling pay-per-click ads is perfectly legal, but Google hates paid links, not organic.
Appropriate attributes (such as rel=”sponsored”) should always be used to identify these links and avoid penalties.
Please validate your link attributes to ensure they comply with our policies.
How to check and remove toxic backlinks
Safe backlinks are good and toxic backlinks are bad. But what now?
What’s the best way to check links and remove harmful links?
You can spend hours combing through every page in your Google Analytics account, identifying, visiting, and checking individual links.
Or you can easily do it with the WebCEO Toxic Link Checker.
The most powerful and reliable spam link checker in the SEO space, WebCEO is integrated with Majestic, the industry’s largest link index database, giving you access to data from over 2,371,111,956,878 URLs, with more being added daily. .
Usage is simple:
1. See all your backlinks quickly: Analyze your backlink profile at a glance
When you sign up for WebCEO, you can get a complete list of domains linking to your website in the Linking Domains report.
WebCEO Backlink Checker quickly determines the number of backlinks pointing to your website, identifies common anchor texts, checks the diversity and authority of link domains, and the ratio of harmful to non-harmful links. helps to display the
WebCEO screenshot, February 20222. Easy to find good pairs.Toxic Backlinks: Identifying Quality
WebCEO’s Toxic Pages report makes it easy to determine which backlinks are contributing to search credibility and which are having the opposite effect.
You can evaluate each backlink individually using analytics metrics such as Anchor Text, Domain Trust Flow, Domain Citation Flow, and Alexa Traffic Rank to decide which links to keep.
WebCEO screenshot, February 20223. See harmful links instantly: Which links are causing your site’s ranking to drop?
WebCEO helps you find bad links, disavow them, and eliminate their negative impact on your rankings with a unique toxicity calculator that you can fine-tune to your needs.
WebCEO screenshot, February 20224. Remove harmful links and avoid damaging your site: easily disavow
Creating, importing, and exporting disavow.txt files has never been easier.
WebCEO has integrated functionality that can be done with just a few clicks.
WebCEO screenshot, February 20225. Get alerted when new toxic backlinks appear: schedule automatic scans and set alerts
Once you’ve removed all those pesky bad backlinks, you need to prevent them from appearing again.
If so, you should be ready to disown them.
WebCEO has an automatic harmful link warning feature that can alert you when new links to your website are discovered.
WebCEO screenshot, February 2022You can set WebCEO to automatically scan the websites you want to monitor.
You can even set email alerts on your tasks, so you’ll be instantly aware of any changes.
Between managing your website and keeping up with changes in SEO algorithms, there’s plenty to do.
Take backlink evaluation and harmful link removal off your to-do list and give WebCEO’s Backlink Checker a try. Sign up now and try it free for 14 days.
