Secure your website from harmful links: How to remove bad links from your website
Every year, Google’s web algorithm trawls through billions of pages and backlinks to identify spam content and protect its users.
The process of removing bad backlinks is relatively simple, if time-consuming:
Understand what makes a backlink ‘toxic’ Use a tool to identify all bad links pointing to your website Contact the webmaster and request the removal Create and submit a ‘disavow’ file to Google to ignore those links
- Types of Link Spam You Want to Avoid
That said, there are some backlink types that you absolutely never want to connect with your website:
Links from penalized domains Links from link directories and link farms Links from ‘bad neighborhoods’ ( pharma, online gambling) Links from foreign language sites A large number of links from unrelated websites A large number of exact-match anchor text links.
- Find Where Those Toxic Links Are Coming From
Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, and Monitor Backlinks are useful for this purpose, because they flag all the links that fit their definitions of a ‘toxic’ link.
Each of these apps uses different metrics, but if you’re using Monitor Backlinks, it’ll show you everything from Moz’s spam score. Whichever tool you’re using to identify your bad links, try to find an export option.
A downloadable CSV file will enable you to sort and order the data, which will come in handy when determining which websites to contact first to ask them to remove the links pointing to your site.
- Create and Submit a Disavow File to Google
It’s a simple enough tool which enables you to import a text file (using Google Search Console) containing all the links you want Google to ignore. You can record specific URLs in it, or you can go broad and ask Google to ignore all the links from a specific domain.
or simply search on the google disavow tool just enter your properties and upload your disavow txt file.
Use the Disavow Links tool carefully, and only after a thorough analysis of your backlinks profile - the last thing you want to do is disavow high-quality backlinks and negatively impact your organic rankings.
After submitting, be patient - it takes time for the file to get processed, and at this point, all you can do is wait for your rankings to start slowly recovering.
Ask questions if you have got any
