Toxic Backlinks: How to Recover

Building backlinks can help your website rank higher in SERP across all the keywords you target. It’s virtually impossible to rank in the top 10 of Google for a competitive keyword with little to no backlinks pointing to your site.

Building backlinks can also hurt your website tremendously, up to the point of a manual penalty, if done wrong. If your backlink profile has too many toxic backlinks, they will undermine all the other SEO efforts.

In this article, we’ll explore what toxic backlinks are, how to find toxic backlinks, and how to make sure they don’t impact your site negatively.

Despite this, the term toxic link is widely used in the SEO community. Along with this one, there are two other distinct terms: manipulative links and spammy links.

If a website has appeared on disavow lists multiple times or has been spotted practicing spammy link building, a link from it would hurt your SEO efforts, no matter how it’s placed. Hence, the definition, a toxic link.

Spammy backlinks are links that you have no control over. They appear just as regular spam in your email inbox—unsolicited and unwanted. Typically, they are coming from websites that publish your content, from sites that link to thousands of others, like domain statistics sites, or are placed by the competitors in an effort to devalue your site.

Google algorithms are pretty good at finding and disregarding those types of links.

Manipulative links are more in line with Google’s definition. These are the links placed in an effort to manipulate the search rankings of your site. They don’t necessarily come from a toxic source, but often can. Typically, these links are bought or gained through a link exchange scheme and have overoptimized anchors.

You don’t have control over spammy links, but Google deals with those on its own. Most of the manipulative and toxic links were created by you. Either as a part of a poorly-researched link-building strategy or because you didn’t understand that the website was toxic when you were creating the link.

Link building is enough work on its own, and monitoring toxic backlinks adds more time to the team’s busy schedule. Here’s why it’s important.

Google employs reviewers who look at the sites to manually estimate their quality. If a Google reviewer catches a site breaking Google's guidelines, they can issue a manual penalty. It will most likely lead to a severe drop in rankings and traffic.

There are multiple reasons a manual penalty can be issued, and getting involved in manipulative link-building practices is one of them. You will be notified in Google Search Console if your website receives a manual penalty. 

Monitoring and removing toxic links prevents that from happening once a Google employee takes a look at your site.

Algorithmic penalties typically come unannounced. The only way you can notice them is by seeing a sudden drop in rankings and traffic or even removal from certain pages from the index.

This type of penalty triggers automatically when Google algorithms believe your website breaks Google’s guidelines. The reasons for this can include thin content and suspicions of being involved in manipulative linking practices.

An abundance of toxic links on your site can be one of the factors that lead to getting your site filtered. Keeping your backlink profile free of toxic links can help you avoid this kind of action from Google.

Association with toxic websites, portals that break Google’s spam policies and place manipulative links, can hurt your website's reputation in the eyes of search engines. Even if it doesn’t lead to a penalty, it can hurt your SEO.

Toxic links don’t always lead to a manual or algorithmic penalty, but they often can harm your website’s SEO efforts. Your website will have trouble outranking competitors if its backlink profile has too many toxic backlinks.

Avoiding toxic links and doubling down your efforts on building a small number of quality ones can help your site get through a ranking plateau and gain more traffic.

Typically, acquiring toxic or manipulative links takes resources, either directly paying the website owner or engaging in some kind of link exchange scheme. When you stop working on getting those links, you’ll free a sizeable chunk of the marketing budget that you can invest in earning links that actually help your SEO.

There are multiple types of toxic or manipulative backlinks. Here are the most widespread ones.

Buying or selling links is against Google’s guidelines if they’re not marked with a rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” attribute. Google’s algorithms and employees can’t know for sure whether a link is paid for or not, so they are likely to rely on other evidence, like this:

Links from websites like these can hurt your SEO.

Link farms are created only to sell links. You can spot those by:

Websites like these are likely caught or will be caught by Google engaging in illicit linking schemes and can hurt your SEO efforts.

Link exchanges are deals where you link to a site and the site links back to you. Google guidelines specify that “excessive” link exchanges violate them.

Exchanging a couple of links with one website probably won’t get you into trouble, but if there are hundreds of links like that or the website has a page dedicated to cross-linking, it can become a problem.

PBN is a network of websites created to place multiple links to a website in an effort to manipulate search rankings. Typically, you can spot those by a shared IP address, similar design, poor performance indicators like traffic numbers, and an imbalance in incoming and outgoing links.

User-generated content like posts on forums, websites like Quora and Reddit, or comments on blog posts can be considered toxic if they are overoptimized or placed in large numbers. For instance, if there are hundreds of irrelevant links from user-generated content that have the same anchor, it could raise suspicion.

Many websites with UGC can flag automated posting as spam as well.

Another type of manipulative link is an automated link. In this strategy, people use software that posts multiple links on blog post websites, social media, or submission websites. This typically produces unnatural links and would be considered a breach of Google's spam policy.

Creating a free website widget that contains a link to your site is an advanced link-building strategy. It can backfire, though, as toxic websites can use your widgets as well. If you don’t make those widget links nofollow by default, earning toxic links can hurt your SEO.

Using expired domains to boost your SEO can go wrong in two major ways. First, if you post irrelevant content on the renewed domain to place links from it to your site, it directly breaks Google's policy.

Placing a 301 redirect from the renewed domain to your site isn’t forbidden by Google guidelines, but it can potentially hurt you if the domain you’re using for this has been spotted breaking the guidelines before.

Links inserted in a reputable website without the owners’ permission or knowledge through hacking isn’t just unethical, it will hurt your SEO. You can run into this type of manipulative link if you purchase links from reputable domains on a shady marketplace for a low price.

Placing manipulative links can hurt your SEO in and of itself. If they’re placed in a way that’s hidden from the users, such as setting the text color the same as the background, or positioning text beyond the screen, it can increase the negative impact.

Placing your content on a press release website in exchange for a fee is typically in line with Google guidelines. It might be a violation when the only reason for posting a press release is to get a backlink.

If you post on a reputable press release website and create a relevant press release copy, you should be able to avoid any suspicion from Google.

A rare but dangerous occurrence is a negative SEO attack. During such an attack, your competitors or blackmailers would post hundreds or thousands of harmful backlinks to your site to bring it down in search. Their motivations are either to get their site ranking higher or to receive payment for deleting those links.

Let’s look at how you can vet websites you want to build links from or ones that already link to you to make sure they’re not toxic or manipulative.

At first glance, you might not recognize a toxic website. Here are the factors that you should look at to confirm whether it’s a good or a bad link:

If a referring domain or a page that links to your site has a couple of these factors, it might be okay. Look at the bigger picture. If there are multiple issues, it’s probably a toxic link.

Identifying toxic links is a lengthy process. Here’s how to find toxic backlinks step by step:

Ideally, you’d want to visit every website, but that might be impractical for large lists of links. Add the links you’ve identified as problematic to a toxic backlinks list for further removal.

Now that you have a list of toxic links that point to your site, let’s explore how to manage your backlinks and make sure they don’t negatively impact your SEO.

Get email addresses of the webmasters or website owners and send an email asking for the removal of links. You might have to run an email marketing campaign to increase deliverability and follow up until you get an answer.

Some websites, like PBNs, might not have an email associated with them, or the owners might not answer you because they’re not opening their inbox. In case you suspect a website is manipulative in nature and has low domain metrics, it’s best to reach out to the subcontractor who has placed those links.

They may either own that website or have the addresses of people who do. Requesting removal through them would have higher chances of success.

After reaching out to your subcontractors and running a removal campaign, you can go ahead and use the Disavow Tool to remove any links that remain. Use this tool carefully.

Create a text file with the pages that you want to disavow the links from. If you want to disavow all links from a domain, use the “domain:” prefix. Upload the list to Google Search Console, and it should work within a few weeks.

Toxic backlinks can reduce your odds of ranking high on many search engines and can even put your website under a manual or algorithmic action, which results in a significant drop in keyword rankings.

To avoid this, don’t engage in policy-breaking practices to begin with. If you have done so in the past or suspect you’ve built some toxic links accidentally, monitor your backlink profile. Find suspicious links, investigate them, and remove them if your suspicions are true.