Business websites often make a big mistake by hiring some unreliable SEO organizations that help in getting quick search engine rankings. They often buy bad backlinks to solve the purpose. But this activity often creates risks for the website and you can lose rankings and even be penalized. Buying bad links can give you short-term benefits, but you are always at risk and unnatural links often indicate that your website does not have the relevant or quality content to be interesting and get the right backlinks on its own.
Identify the different types of backlinks:
With different types of backlinks, it is very important to identify the good from the bad and work on them accordingly so that there is no effect on the ranking of the site.
Backlinks for SEO purpose only– If you find that a website has multiple backlinks that lack any quality, form of structure, or cohesion, then the site was probably created to provide links to other sites. In case the site is developed using WordPress CMS, you will notice that it lacks the features and just uses the default theme.
Anchor texts on optimized: Usually the link text of a website on another site is the name of the site. If you find that the link to your site has used an additional set of keywords, it may also be suspicious to search engines and is usually an unethical practice on the part of suspicious webmasters. It is recommended that you use meaningful anchor text and link only to relevant websites.
Links from different geographic locations: You may notice that the links connecting you are from different countries and in different languages. It only makes sense if the links are from a similar industry and use you as an authorized reference. But many times such links are connected to sites that are completely irrelevant, making them look suspicious.
Links in comments:
For larger sites, automated bots often comment on the site and leave a link on it as well. Such comments are very generic, but some reader comments are meant to share a link with you. Therefore, it is crucial to verify comments or even approve them before reflecting them on the site. This way you can avoid having spam comments.
How to get rid of bad backlinks
Once you’ve identified your bad backlinks, it’s time to remove them. So here is what you can easily do to remove them:
contact the owner: This is the best and easiest way to remove bad backlinks. You can contact the owner and ask them to remove the link. But be prepared to face some webmasters who will demand payment to remove the link or may not respond at all.
Start again: In case the problem is deep and consumes resources to solve it, it is best to close your website and start over. But this is the last option after being penalized by Google or Penguin or even a manual penalty. You can also seek professional help from a reputed SEO company to get your site back on track.
remove the pagesNote: In case you find that the links are pointing to low-quality content pages on your site, then the best thing to do is to remove the pages using 404 or 410 reports instead of removing the links. But this should be used sparingly, as 404 reports can also create the wrong image on Google.
override allNote: In case you have too many bad links and don’t get any help from webmasters, you can simply disavow them. This means that you can send a message to Google to disregard the links when the site is indexed.