What are good backlinks?
Quality backlinks come from websites that are relevant to your industry and have high credibility and authority online. These links strengthen your website's reputation and can increase your ranking in the search engines.
Toxic backlinks are a potential danger to your website
Toxic backlinks are links from low-quality or spam sites that can harm your website's SEO performance. Having too many of these links can result in your site being considered spam by search engines and suffering penalties, including lost rankings, poor domain scores or even suspension from search results.
What makes a backlink bad?
There are several factors that can make a backlink bad:
Low quality of the website
Backlinks from websites that are low quality, spammy or have low authority can damage your own website's reputation and ranking in search results.
Non-relevance
Links from websites that are not relevant to your industry or the topic of your website can also be considered bad backlinks by the search engines.
Over-optimized anchor texts
If the anchor text for a backlink is over-optimized with exact match keywords or contains spammy terms, it can be considered manipulative by search engines.
Too many links from the same source
Getting an excessive amount of backlinks from the same domain can also be perceived as spammy and can result in negative consequences for your website.
Sites in breach of guidelines
Backlinks from sites that violate Google's guidelines, such as pirate sites or sites with illegal content, can also damage your site's reputation.
How can you quality assure backlinks?
To ensure the quality of your backlinks and avoid bad links, you can take the following steps:
Avoid buying links
Buying links or participating in link sales can lead to bad backlinks and can result in penalties from search engines.
Use reliable SEO tools
Use tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs or Moz to analyze your backlink profile and identify any malicious links.
Build organic backlinks
Focus on creating high-quality content that is worth linking to and actively work on building relationships with other sites in your industry to get natural backlinks.
Monitor and clean regularly
Monitor your backlink profile regularly and remove any bad links that could damage your site's reputation and ranking.
How to deal with toxic backlinks?
By being aware of what makes a backlink bad and actively working to quality assure your links, you can protect your website from potential negative effects. It is important to regularly monitor your website's backlink profile and identify any toxic backlinks.
Get help from Atom Agency
By using tools like Google Search Console or third-party SEO tools, you can track and remove malicious links to protect your website's reputation and ranking in search results. We have the tools and knowledge to help you scan your site for the types of backlinks you have and how to deal with them. If you want to learn more about how backlinks affect your website's SEO, book a free consultation!
