We have an in-depth guide about how to get rid of bad backlinks on our training platform. Check it out here: https://bit.ly/33QSjBo
Having a good number of high-quality backlinks pointing to your website tells the search engines that your website is authoritative and worthy of a high rank in the search results.
However, having spammy, low-quality backlinks pointing to your website can have the opposite effect and potentially spell disaster for your SEO and organic rankings.
So, if you discover that your website is being targeted by spammy or unwanted links that are damaging your SEO, what can you do about it?
This video will explain three ways to get rid of bad backlinks.
Firstly, make sure that your website always returns a “404” response to pages that don’t exist.
Failing to do this can make your website prone to link spam attacks.
For example, if an attacker creates spam links pointing to lots of non-existent pages on your domain and you only have 301 redirects in place pointing to your homepage, this will pass on the bad link juice to your homepage, which will eventually damage your entire website’s SEO.
If a 404 is returned instead, then Google may notice a lot of 404 errors for your site, but links to broken pages have no impact, so it won’t be a bad link problem anymore.
Secondly, if you notice that all the bad backlinks are pointing towards a deep page that you don’t actually need anymore, you may want to delete that page.
It you decide to go down this route, remember to ensure that the deleted page returns a 404 error, otherwise the bad link juice could just be passed onto your homepage, as I discussed before.
Most often, however, bad links will point to a website’s homepage. This is where it gets ugly, as obviously you don’t want to delete your homepage!
This is where the third option comes in: You can use Google’s disavowal tool to tell the search engine which links you want it to ignore when it’s calculating your rankings.
By telling Google to ignore the bad links, you can undo the SEO damage caused by those links.
It’s even been revealed by Google that it actually trusts your links more and will potentially give you a ranking boost if you regularly disavow bad backlinks.
Just make sure that the backlinks you’re disavowing are actually bad ones, by conducting a proper backlink audit.
After all, you don’t want to get too trigger-happy and accidentally tell Google to ignore perfectly good links which are actually friendly for your SEO.
Do you have any other tips about how to get rid of bad backlinks? Let us know in the comments below!
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