What are backlinks?

Backlinks (usually referred to as "inbound links," "incoming links," or "one-way links") are links from one website to another's page. Google and other prominent search engines think backlinks are "votes" for a particular website. Pages with a significant number of backlinks have higher organic search engine rankings. Moreover, Backlinks are a vital part of any comprehensive SEO strategy. However, not all backlinks are created equal. Some backlinks may be harming your site's rankings rather than helping them. These "undesirable" backlinks can come from spammy or low-quality websites, irrelevant directory listings, or even sites penalized by search engines. It's essential to regularly audit your backlink profile and find and eliminate any undesirable backlinks that could hurt your website's SEO. In this article, we'll explore different methods for identifying and removing these harmful backlinks and ensuring your site performs optimally in search engine rankings. Backlinks are effectively votes from other websites in favor of your site. Each franchise signals search engines, "This material is valuable, credible, and useful." The more of those "votes" you have, the better your site ranks on Google and other search engines.

What are bad backlinks?

Backlinks from a shady website are known as bad backlinks. Google has been cracking down on poor links since the Penguin algorithm upgrade 2012. Websites broke Google Webmaster Guidelines with black hat SEO before the Penguin algorithm was released. People were essentially paying for connections to gain greater rankings and authority—this was unacceptable. A penguin was born as a result. This upgrade penalized web pages associated with these bad backlinks rather than enhancing their ranks.

What makes a backlink bad?

Various factors might raise the toxicity of a backlink in the eyes of search engines and make a backlink terrible, including:

• Low domain trust score - The number of backlinks from trusted domains to the domain giving the backlink determines the domain's trust score. A low rank indicates that the domain score of the site has been intentionally boosted.
• Mirrored pages - Search engines may detect a link-building strategy if similar pages on multiple sites connect to you using the exact anchor text.
• The connecting website may be perceived as low-quality if the visible text-to- HTML ratio is typical.

How to detect and eliminate bad backlinks?

1. A Penalty Has Been Applied to Your Website

Before getting right in and how to eliminate bad backlinks, it is a clever idea to check to see whether your website has been penalized by Google. The first form of the Google link penalty is a manual punishment, whereas the second type is an algorithmic (Penguin) penalty.

• The detection of unnatural links notification will appear in Google Webmaster Tools if your website has been punished with a manual penalty. It needs to be clarified what triggers Google to start manually analyzing your website. Still, someone filing a spam report against you or targeting excessively competitive niches like loans or insurance will force Google to pay more attention to your site.
• If you have been slapped with an algorithmic penalty, Google will not tell you, but you might notice a drop in organic search traffic around the time of algorithm updates. The simplest way to determine how much traffic has been lost because of algorithm modifications is to synchronize your website analytics with the Penguin tool. The Penguin tool compares your organic search traffic to the dates of key Google algorithm updates.

2. Obtain Your Backlink Information

• You understood how serious your backlink profile is crucial to clean it up. The step of "how to detect bad backlinks?" is collecting backlink data. Many tools are accessible to assist you in identifying which connections point to your website, and you must employ various mechanisms to guarantee that no stone is left unturned. The following are some of the valuable tools:
• Open Site Explorer
• Majestic SEO
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools

Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO require that you sign up for their services to get all the data out; however, Open Site Explorer offers a free 30-day premium trial, and MajesticSEO allows you to export complete link data for your website by uploading a unique.txt file to the top of your website directory. Once you can access the appropriate tools, export all link data from each into separate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, as shown in Figure 2.0.

3. Keep Track of Your Backlinks

The next step of “how to detect bad backlinks?" is keeping track of your backlinks. After you've separated all your backlink data from the above sources into separate sheets, you'll need to combine it into one spreadsheet to get a complete picture. We want to maintain uniformity across our list of backlinks. Therefore, we'll concentrate solely on compiling a list of connecting URLs using Google Webmaster Tools. Create a new sheet called "Collated" within your current Excel Spreadsheet. All linked URLs from each sheet should now be copied and pasted into our newly created "Collated" sheet. After we have highlighted the linked URLs column, we need to go to "Data"> "Remove Duplicates" to get rid of the duplicate entries. Select the relevant column, in this case, "Column A," and then click "OK." A notification should now appear telling you the number of duplicate entries removed. We now have a comprehensive list of URLs and can begin determining which ones are active and potentially damaging to our website.

4. Identify the Dead Links 

Despite most backlink research tools striving to deliver the most up-to-date information, web admins may have recently taken down websites or removed pages where our links may be found. To acquire the most up-to-date data, we need to run a real-time check of each backlink to see if our connection is still active. SEO Tools for Excel is a fantastic Excel add-in that uses an innovative algorithm to check active links on the fly. Once the plugin is installed, we need to input the formula to check our list of URLs for any links returning to our website. Replace "http://www.YourWebsiteURL.com*" with your actual URL in column "B1"=CheckBacklink (A1,"http://www.YourWebsiteURL.com*") and click return. (Remove the * at the end). SEO Tools for Excel will review the URL in column A1 and look for any active hyperlinks to your website (even internal pages).

5. Identify the Bad Links

Although most internet marketers can immediately recognize a hazardous link simply by looking at the URL, it is still an innovative idea to dig deeper and manually analyze a selection of domains based on the following criteria:

• Metrics of Low Domain Flow;
• CCTLD that is not relevant;
• Links to our website from other websites that are not related to its content or topic;
• The number of outbound connections from the page where your backlink is located — the more external links your link has, the less reliable it is;
• The Google Page Rank of the website's home page is 0 or N/A.
• There is no social interaction (Likes, Shares, or Retweets);
• Anchor text that is overly optimized and contains a lot of keywords;
• In Google's SERPs, there are few or no indexed pages.

6. Eliminate bad backlinks

This phase requires you to contact the owners or web admins of the linked sites. Requesting that they eliminate bad backlinks without threatening them is the key. Indicate the precise position of the backlink you wish removed. SpyFu's backlink outreach feature can help you uncover the web admin's contact information.

7. Keep track and keep an eye on things.

It's not enough to send a removal request to the web admins of affiliated sites to get rid of harmful backlinks. To determine whether your backlinks have cooperated with your request, you must track them. You can also send a follow-up email to a web admin if they don't react within 5-10 days.

8. Disavow the rest of the shady backlinks.

The initial step is to compile a list of disavowed links. To keep track of this, you can use an Excel spreadsheet. After that, all you have to do is download your list to Google's Disavow Links service. This tells Google that these links should not be considered when assessing your website's search engine rankings.

What to do when a competitor buys backlinks to your site with the wrong keywords?

Sometimes, a competitor buys backlinks to your site with the wrong keywords. In this case, you can use several tactics to pinpoint competitors' guest posts quickly. 

1. Make use of sophisticated Google search queries.

Google search should be your first stop when looking for competition guest articles. You can use a variety of queries, but this one is one of the most effective:

"Author name" + "guest post" -site:competitordomain.com -site:https://twitter.com 

You might try a different search phrase to see if it brings up any other results:

 "Author name" + inurl:author

2. Use the reverse image search feature.

To identify posts with the author's headshot, utilize Google's reverse image search (right-click an image while using Chrome).

3. Make use of the Ahrefs Content Explorer.

You may also search for content created by a specific author using Ahrefs Content Explorer. This tool, like Google, provides several advanced search operators. Let's have a look at the following query: 

Author: Author name

Bottom line: if a competitor has already had a guest post accepted on a site, there's a strong probability you'll be able to get published there as well.