Remove Bad Links from Your Site with This Simple Trick
Impact of Bad Links
Every webmaster has bad links on their website. In some cases, bad links are intentional and this is done to make a website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). In some other cases, bad links are unintentional and they damage a webmaster’s site by decreasing the site’s overall quality score. When bad or expired backlinks point at a domain, that domain gets bad link juice from those domains. And thus have a negative effect on your website rankings.
In this article some tips about Remove Bad Links from Your Site with a Simple Trick
To know how bad backlinks affects your website, you must do some bad backlinks analysis on the web page where the bad links are pointing at. For example, if bad links are pointing at the homepage of any domain, it will affect all other pages of that website. So doing a bad backlink analysis for the homepage is highly recommended if your primary target is to improve the overall quality score of that particular domain.
You can also find bad link profile reports from SEO tools like Moz Open Site Explorer or Raven Tools etc which are used by most SEO professionals across the globe. I have been using both these tools for the last 3-4 years and you can use them too if they satisfy your needs.
Moz inbound links tool is suitable for bad link analysis if your main target is to find bad backlinks of any URL. You have to enter the targeted URL in this tool and it will show you bad links report of that particular URL.
Raven Tools provides bad backlink profile reports free of cost, but Moz charges $99/month for 8 months package.
If you are tight on a budget I suggest Raven tools for doing bad backlinks analysis.
– Enter a target domain name in the above webmaster tools search box and click on the search button.
– Once the below page has loaded up, click on the traffic section from the menu bar.
– As soon as you click on the traffic section, Google shows all bad links pointing at the selected domain.
– Try to figure out what bad backlinks means? It is very important before doing a bad link analysis. Bad backlinks are defined as spammy or bad links pointing at your website/URLs. These bad links may originate either from forum profiles, directory submissions, guestbook comment spamming, etc…
For example, if you have bad links coming out of the blog comments section, then Google considers these bad blog comments as bad backlinks because people usually put these spammy or low-quality comments on different forums for monetization purposes. Thus pass bad link juice (PageRank) to bad links.
– Next step is to remove bad backlinks from your web page or delete bad links coming out of the blog comments section etc… As soon as you figure out bad backlinks, you should disavow these bad/low-quality links on Google webmaster tools and wait for 3-4 months and see how it affects your overall website’s quality score in SERPs.
– You can also work with SEO professionals having good knowledge about current algorithm updates by Google to improve your site’s overall quality score in SERPs by removing bad backlinks. If you don’t want to do anything on your own then you can use the bad link removal service provided by SEO agencies that have good knowledge of bad backlinks and their effects on the website’s overall quality score in SERPs.
Ways to Overcome Bad Links:
– No Follow Attribute:
Websites usually add a rel=nofollow tag to bad links, which does not pass link juice (PageRank) to bad links. Google considers these bad links with no follow attributes as spammy backlinks.
– Disavow Tool:
Google provides webmasters with Disavow Links tool through which they can disavow bad or spammy backlinks pointing at their website/URLs. This is one of the best ways to overcome bad backlink issues on your website. I highly recommend this approach if you want to improve your site’s overall quality score in SERPs or fasten up your site’s page rank.
– 301 Redirects:
Sometimes bad links are pointing at old/inactive pages on your website that you don’t want to remove, but still, bad backlinks are bad. If these bad backlinks are important for your site, then you can redirect the URL through a new URL by adding 301 HTTP status codes in your web server’s .htaccess file or via DNS settings. You can also follow this tutorial to do redirecting bad URLs with 301 HTTP status codes.
– Remove Bad Links using Google Webmaster Tools :
This is another free way of removing bad backlinks pointing at your website/URLs. While doing bad backlink checking of your site, you can check for bad links using Google Webmaster Tools as well.