What is a Toxic Score?

The toxic score is one of the problems faced by many internet entrepreneurs. While some backlinks can move the website to the top, some backlinks will cause us to lose ranking. Therefore, it is necessary to detect toxic backlinks and reject them.

How to Detect Toxic Backlinks?

Toxic backlinks are backlinks on your website that are maliciously directed to your website by other platforms. These websites have nothing to do with you or your institution. In parallel with the increasing competition in the digital sectors, many websites started to focus on negative SEO studies. These backlinks lead to a negative evaluation of your website by the Google search engine. The main purpose of redirecting toxic links to your website is to lower your site's ranking in Google. In particular, bets can be placed from sites with content unrelated to your website, especially those with negative content. In order to understand that you have a problem in this direction, you should regularly analyze backlinks. You need to notify Google that the toxic backlinks you have identified are not related to you. By helping Google bots make a health assessment, you can tell them that they are not responsible for toxic backlinks. These links are unnatural links. After the Google Penguin update, the penalties for websites with toxic backlink profiles became even more severe. Links that harm your website can be created organically, and if you try to get too many backlinks, this can also damage your website.

How to get rid of toxic backlinks?

Rejecting toxic backlinks can happen by fighting them. The Google Disavow Link Tool is one of the most active analysis tools to combat toxic backlinks. With this tool, you can let Google know that you have nothing to do with toxic backlinks. Thus, you can avoid being penalized in the evaluation made by Google. To combat toxic backlinks, you should follow these steps;

Make Backlink Analysis for Your Website

In order to find links that harm your website, you first need to analyze all the backlinks on your website. You can measure the backlinks for your website with many paid or free SEO tools. You can use many tools, such as Majestic SEO and Ahrefs. You can use several tools at the same time to make an accurate analysis. After your analysis, you can see from which sources the backlinks come. You need to collect all the links you find in a list. So far, you have determined all the backlinks on your site that will be useful or toxic. You have no idea which one is hurting your website until now.

Find the Toxic Backlinks on Your List

After the backlink analysis you have done, you need to examine the data in your list one by one and reveal the toxic ones. It can be difficult to analyze websites with thousands of backlinks individually. You can find tools such as NetPeak Checker to perform batch analysis. With this tool, you can detect backlinks on your website in a short time. Backlinks that are useful for your website have a high Alexa value. Therefore, while filtering, you can sort the backlinks that are useful for your website from the list by sorting them according to their Alexa values. One of the biggest mistakes made when rejecting links in our country is the rejection of English links by filtering. In this case, it should be noted that you only reject links from social media platforms with high traffic, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Evaluating according to Alexa value will be more accurate for your website. You should also filter in the language category when searching for toxic backlinks. In this way, you can easily determine whether your website has toxic backlinks from a site opened in a foreign language. An important advantage of the NetPeak Checker tool is that it ranks the relevant site in its own country and adds the country's flag to the list. This ranking is called "Alexa Local." When you do not get effective results in your evaluation according to languages, you can see from which country the site was opened with Alexa traffic data. So far, you have identified all the links that are toxic to your website. But even if you know it now, Google doesn't know yet.

Reporting the toxic backlinks you detected to Google

Google Disavow Tool

Disavow Tool is a tool you can use to notify the Google search engine that the link you get from the website is toxic, or the link is not recognized. So why do we need Disavow Tool? This term, also known as "Backlinks Rejection Tool," is used to prevent backlinks that create toxic effects. There are unethical SEO methods that harm each other or unilaterally while doing SEO work on words with high search volume. There are many tools where you can see these studies and manage them. Disavow Tool and SEMRush are some of them. With the help of these tools, you can manage your toxic Backlinks and easily manage all the links that you do not want to be associated with your site with the help of these tools.

When should Disavow be used?

When you are exposed to a large number of spam or low-quality links pointing to your site. Due to the manual operations, you perform on your site You can easily use the Disavow Tool if your site is penalized by Google and if there are negative SEO practices applied to your site.

How to use a Disavow Tool?

Step 1: Identify the correct connections for Disavow.

The only way to completely understand your backlink profile is through a complete analysis of your links. In the first step, you should gather as many external links as possible. You can check some of these using Google Search Console, but you should see more than Google shows you. That's why you can find tools that check for free backlinks by searching Google with words like free backlink checker. Backlink checking is definitely the hardest part of the rejection process. It is also the most time-consuming task, as you will need to carefully and thoroughly examine your links.

Step 2: Create your Disavow file.

After you complete the backlink check and identify the backlink sources you want to reject, you can start the actual Disavow process. First, let's take a look at Google's format requirements; The file type must be .txt. We often find that Mac users are not creating files in the correct formats because they have issues with sending. Do not use .docx, .xlsx, .rtf, or the like. Google will not accept these files. Additionally, certain text editors are unable to show the Disavow file properly. We see that Notepad sometimes has difficulty opening the file correctly. You can use other text editors like Wordpad, Sublime, and Notepad++ instead.

The file must be in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII format.

The file should not be larger than 2 MB.

Make sure to include a URL/domain per line.

You can add a specific URL or the entire domain. It may be better to cancel the entire domain, especially if there are unwanted backlinks from spammy sites. It is recommended that subdomains be removed separately. You should add backlinks without proper analysis. You should ensure to load all the backlinks you want to reject. You should not miss any of the links you previously identified as risky.

Step 3: Upload your Disavow file.

First of all, from the Google Disavow link rejection window, we select the website we want to process and press the "Reject Links" button. In the opening window, we select the .txt file we created from the "Choose File" field and press the "Send" button, and then "Done." 

Step 4: Boost your Disavow file.

It's a common misconception that after you upload the Disavow file, Google immediately starts crawling these links for you. Disavow is just a suggestion for Google to ignore some links related to the next crawl. Google's crawl timing is determined by its own priorities, and it will not adjust it every time a new Disavow file is received. Also, it may take about two days, two weeks, or two months for all Google bots to notice that there is a new Disavow file for your domain.

Google Ranking Factors

Your website ranking on Google depends on many things, but one of the most important ranking factors is definitely your backlink profile. Google tries to rank search results based on the quality and relevance of websites. This relevance is based on the popularity of the content. The more hits you have and the more users share your content, and the more likely Google will rate your website as relevant. This will move your ranking to the top. If you have backlinks on bad sites with bad content, Google may associate your website with such sites and thus classify you as spam. That's why you need to analyze your links on such sites and get rid of bad links by removing or rejecting them.

Keywords:

What are toxic backlinks

Remove toxic backlinks

check toxic backlinks

how to find toxic backlinks