LINK BUILDING
How to Remove Bad Backlinks?
Discover how remove bad backlinks from Google using the complete, step-by-step, guide to bad backlinks removal to improve the website’s ranking.
How to Remove Bad Backlinks from Google (A Step-by-Step Complete Guide)
There are cases you might want to remove bad backlinks from Google.
Maybe because you purchased links from some untrustworthy SEO company or participated in link exchange schemes or because you made the mistake of building low quality unnatural links to your website.
Regardless of the reason, Google will punish you because link building is a violation of Google webmaster guidelines.
In this post, you will learn how to identify bad backlinks and how to tell Google not to take into account bad backlinks pointing to your website.
Towards the end of the post, I’ll give you some pointers on how to get great backlinks without worrying about Google penalties.
Why is Link Building Important?
Before getting into the part on how to clean your website from bad backlinks, let’s see in brief why link building is an important part of the SEO process.
When a user types in a search query in Google, the ranking algorithm evaluates more than 200 signals to decide which pages to show in the first positions of the results (SERPS).
One of the most important signals is PageRank.
As stated by Google, PageRank is Google’s opinion of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other sites.
In other words, a website that has incoming links from other web pages, is perceived by Google as a good website that (other things being equal – think on-page SEO), deservers a higher position in the search results.
So, one good way to show to Google that you have a high-quality website, is to make sure that it has a number of backlinks.
Of course, as you will see below, it’s not just a numbers game, it’s about quality. It’s the website that has quality backlinks that will rank higher and not the website that has the greatest number of backlinks.
Also, it should be made clear that link building it’s only one of the tools that make up what we call off-page SEO.
How does Google Punish a Website?
I mentioned in the introduction that Google may punish a website because of link building, and it’s necessary to explain why and how Google punishes a website.
Any attempt to manipulate PageRank is against Google guidelines.
Google has sophisticated systems that can differentiate between natural backlinks and SEO backlinks that are artificially created for the sole purpose of increasing the PageRank of a website.
A few examples are:
Buying links from various websites, link directories or blogs.
Selling links.
Participating in link exchange schemes (I link to your website and you link to mine).
Guest posting with keyword-rich anchor text links.
Massive link building (using automated programs to create links – usually in website comments).
Google in an attempt to protect the quality of their search results, introduced in April 2012 the Penguin Update.
The penguin update is a set of rules for evaluating the quality of backlinks.
When the algorithm finds that a website has a lot of backlinks that are of low quality (such as the ones described above), then it removes the particular website from the Google index or devalues its rankings (for the website as a whole or for specific pages only).
In other words, the website losses all its rankings and Google trust.
In the past Google used to run the penguin algorithm once every few months but since September 2016, it is integrated as part of the core ranking algorithm.
This means that the checks related to bad link building practices are real-time.
A website may be imposed a penalty at any given time and it can also be released from a penalty (provided that corrective actions were taken), without having to wait for the Penguin update to run.
What is the Difference Between Follow and Nofollow Links?
Another important aspect of link building is the difference between follow and nofollow links.
When Google evaluates the links pointing to a website, it checks whether these links have the nofollow tag.
Links that are nofollow, instruct Google not pass any pagerank value from one website to the other.
In other words, it’s like telling Google not to take into account those links for ranking purposes.
For example, if you serve text ads on your website that have links pointing to other websites, then those links should be nofollow, otherwise Google may think that you are selling links.
Another example, is when you want to link to a site that you don’t trust or you are not sure of the quality of that site.
A good example is links found in the comments section. These links should be nofollowed because many times they are used by spammers and automated bots.
Important: All links are by default followed links. To make a link nofollow you need to add the following directive in the link rel=”nofollow” as shown in the example below:
<a href=”https : // www. example .com” rel=”nofollow”>This is a nofollow link </a>
Why care about follow and nofollow? When you go through the process of finding which links to remove from Google, you only need to take into account links that are followed and not links that have the nofollow tag since those links cannot do any harm to your website.
How to find bad backlinks
The resume from the above introduction is that link building is important for rankings but if you don’t know what you are doing, it will most probably generate the opposite results.
What can you do in this case? Find and remove bad backlinks.
There are two ways to find toxic links pointing to your website.
The first one is to manually analyze your backlinks and identify bad links and the second one (fastest and more reliable), is to make use of a tool.
How to find bad backlinks (the manual way)
The resume from the above introduction is that link building is important for rankings but if you don’t know what you are doing, it will most probably generate the opposite results.
What can you do in this case? Find and remove bad backlinks.
here are two ways to find toxic links pointing to your website.
The first one is to manually analyze your backlinks and identify bad links and the second one (fastest and more reliable), is to make use of a tool.
Read more here.
Additional Link:
Shorter Is Better: Study Says Shorter Content Earns the Most Backlinks
Which Backlinks Should You Build (and when)?