Let’s face it: in SEO, backlinks are one of the most important factors in determining your website’s ranking in SERPs and building authority. Even as we are moving closer to 2025, backlinks still remain one of the most critical SEO ranking factors, with 58.1% of SEOs acknowledging it’s significant impact and 89% of marketers prioritizing link-building.
But why do backlinks continue to be so important?
Search engines consider these backlinks evidence that your page is valuable and trustworthy. When a reputable website links to yours, it signals to search engines that your content is worth exploring.
However, not all backlinks are treated equally or you can say are equally effective. While high-quality links from authoritative websites can boost your SERP rankings, on the other hand, toxic backlinks – links from low-authority or spammy sites are more likely to harm your rank.
In the later case, Google may perceive your site as having low-quality or spammy content, negatively impacting its reputation and search visibility.
To avoid this kind of situation for your website, you need to have a clear picture of the concept of what toxic or bad backlinks are and how they can harm your website. Here is a sneak peek into our points of discussion today –
- What toxic backlinks are?
- Where do these links come from and how many types of them are out there?
- What type of risks and consequences do these links pose to your website?
- How do you identify these links and remove them?
- Best practices to follow to keep them away from your website.
So let’s get started!
What are Toxic Backlinks?
Bad or toxic backlinks are incoming links from external websites that have an adverse impact on your website’s visibility in SERPs.
Bad links don’t serve your SEO purpose, as they are notoriously known for violating Google’s link spam guidelines. They are only placed for manipulating search engine rankings and offer no real value to website owners.
Bad links can significantly damage your site’s reputation in unimaginable ways. Unlike good backlinks from relevant, high-quality websites, toxic backlinks lead to Google penalties and decrease ROI down the line.
Once Google penalizes your website, you will see a direct effect on your rankings and decrease the chances of your pages being found. In worst cases, your pages can be removed entirely from the search index.
Before we go more in depth of what risks and consequences toxic backlinks pose to your website. Let’s first explore some common types of toxic links you should keep an eye out for.
Types of Toxic Backlinks you should be aware of –
1. Paid Links
Paid links involve directly paying website owners to link back to your site, aiming to manipulate rankings artificially.
While it might seem like a quick win, Google strictly prohibits this practice. If detected, Google may de-index these links, or worse, issue a manual penalty that can significantly drop your website’s ranking or even remove it from search results altogether.
2. PBN Links
PBNs, or Private Blog Networks, are networks of sites created solely to boost the ranking of other websites by linking back to them. This black-hat SEO tactic is designed to game search algorithms by mimicking authority.
While PBNs may look tempting, they pose a high risk. In Google’s eyes, it’s a link scheme that violates its Webmaster Guidelines.
3. Unrelated Site Links
Links should make sense to both users and search engines. When you have links from websites unrelated to your industry,niche, or product, they send mixed signals to Google about your site’s relevance. For example, if a women’s clothing site has a link from a SaaS platform, it creates confusion, diminishing the credibility of both sites involved.
These kinds of links create confusion, making both of the sites look less credible and trustworthy in the eyes of search engines like Google.
4. Over-Optimized Anchor Texts
While anchor text helps search engines understand the context of a linked page, overusing keyword-rich anchor text can backfire big time. If a search engine filter identifies you are using the same keyword-rich anchor text repeatedly, it might flag your website as manipulative and potentially penalize it.
To avoid such instances, make sure to take a diverse approach while using your anchor texts. Moreover, using a combination of branded, generic, and keyword-rich anchor texts is highly recommended.
What Risks and Consequences Do Bad Backlinks Pose to Your Website?
A study from backlinko said that “pages with the highest number of total backlinks tended to rank best in Google. We also found that the #1 results has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than the results rankings #2-#10.”
This is what good backlinks can do for your website.
On the contrary, bad backlinks have serious consequences that can push your website down to the search engine result pages. Here’s how it happens:
1. Algorithmic Penalty: The Penguin update was a powerful algorithm Google introduced to target manipulative link-building schemes. It automatically analyzed a site’s incoming links, penalizing those found to be unnatural, irrelevant, or from unauthorized, low-quality sources. The goal was to reduce the ranking of sites that rely on spammy links, reinforcing Google’s commitment to high-quality content.
2. Manual Penalties: Manual penalties are actions taken by Google’s webspam team after identifying a website that violates its Webmaster Guidelines. This may result in serious consequences, such as removing specific pages or even the entire website from search results, or significantly lowering the site’s ranking.
Here is what happens when your site encounters these penalties:
Loss of Traffic:
Google penalties can cause your site to sink in search rankings or even be removed from search results altogether. This drop in visibility leads to a substantial decline in organic traffic, which directly impacts conversions, leads, and revenue.
Reduced Authority:
Practicing manipulative or spammy link-building tactics puts your site at risk of Google penalties, which can severely damage your website’s authority. When penalized, your site is seen as less trustworthy by both users and search engines, leading to lower rankings in SERPs and affecting your brand’s overall reputation.
Negative Impact on Brand Trust:
Penalties, whether algorithmic or manual, signal to users that your site might not be a reliable source. As your search rankings drop, so does your credibility in the eyes of potential customers and clients.
Let’s look at an example.
Google’s bad backlinks penalty against Halifax Bank (the UK’s biggest provider of personal loans and residential mortgages) significantly impacted its online visibility.
The company tried to violate Google’s system to make their website appear higher in search results by using ads with links to many different pages on their website and other websites. This drastically dropped about 20% on their rankings, affecting the bank’s online presence and potential customer reach.
This example clearly represents the consequences websites will have to bear in case their backlink portfolio is all about toxic spammy backlinks. Where some websites intentionally manipulate search rankings, in several cases, there are websites that do not even know that their backlink portfolio has spammy domains which are hindering potential search rankings.
Identifying toxic domains linking to your site is equally important as knowing what consequences these links bring. Let’s look at some easy ways you can identify these links.
How to Find Toxic Backlinks?
Understanding bad backlinks is the first step towards identifying and mitigating risks associated with them.
Now that we have established what toxic backlinks are, now the question remains how do you identify bad backlinks?
Audit your backlinks portfolio in order to identify toxic backlinks can be performed in two ways. One is by using a third party tool – here we have taken SEMRush as the example tool and displayed a step by step process of identifying toxic backlinks.
Second is by using the Google Search Console tool.
a) SEMrush’s Backlink Audit Tool:
Step 1: Sign Up for a Free SEMrush Trial
- Create an account: Sign up for a free 7-day trial of SEMrush.
- Access the Backlink Audit Tool: Navigate to the “Backlink Audit” tool once logged in.
Step 2: Start Your Backlink Audit
- Enter Your Domain: Input your website’s domain name into the search bar.
- Configure Your Audit: Customize the audit settings as needed (optional).
- Initiate the Audit: Click the “Start Backlink Audit” button.
Step 3: Analyze Your Backlink Profile
Once the audit is complete, SEMrush will categorize your backlinks into three levels of toxicity:
- Toxic Backlinks (Red): These are the most harmful links with a toxicity score of 60-100. Prioritize removing these links.
- Potential Toxic Backlinks (Orange): These links have a toxicity score of 45-59. While less harmful, consider removing them if they come from irrelevant websites.
- Non-Toxic Backlinks (Green): These are high-quality backlinks with a toxicity score of 0-44. Make it a point to acquire more links like these.
Tip: Take Action on Toxic Backlinks
Focus on the highest-priority toxic backlinks. Using SEMrush’s built-in email tool, send requests to webmasters to remove the links. If manual removal is not possible, use Google’s Disavow tool to inform search engines about the toxic links.
b) Google Search Console (GSC)
Step 1: Access Google Search Console
Log in to your Google Search Console account. Navigate to the “Links” section on the left-hand side menu.
Step 2: Identify Top Linking Sites
Click on “More” under the “Top linking sites” section. This will display a list of websites that link to yours.
Step 3: Analyze Individual Backlinks
Click on a specific website to see the pages on your site receiving backlinks. Click on a target page to view the specific pages on the linking website that point to your content.
Tip: Evaluate Website Quality and Identify Red Flags
- Check the website’s domain authority using tools like Moz or Ahrefs. Low-quality domains indicate a less reputed site, which is a red flag to watch out for.
- Assess the quality of the content on the linking website. Check for poorly written, keyword-stuffed, or spammy content.
- Ensure the website’s theme is relevant to your niche. Avoid websites with unrelated or overly generic content.
- Analyze the context of the backlink. Is it placed naturally, or does it appear forced?
- Be aware of outdated website design, which could simply mean that the site has not been updated for a long time.
- A website that lacks contact information is a red flag you need to stay away from.
- A high number of broken links can indicate a poorly maintained website.
- Ensure the website does not engage in spammy marketing tactics, such as excessive link exchanges, ads, and comment spam.
Great now you know that your website does contain a lot of toxic links. Next step?
Get rid of them straight away. Here’s how to remove toxic backlinks.
How to remove toxic backlinks – Actionable Steps
If your site hits a manual action, Google recommends removing the links from the other website by contacting the site owner. Or if you cannot get them removed, then you disavow them.
Here’s how to remove toxic or unnatural links in case of a manual action.
Step 1: Check Google Search Console for Manual Actions
Log in to your Google Search Console account. Navigate to the “Security & Manual Actions” tab. Click on “Manual actions.”
You will obtain a detailed report outlining the issue if your site has been penalized for unnatural links.
Step 2: Identify Unnatural Backlinks
Start by exporting all the links from GSC. You can download the data into a spreadsheet.
Now, it’s time to analyze the exported links and run a backlink audit to spot any unnatural links.
Look for any links, be it a paid link, excessive link exchange, low-quality directory link, comment with over-optimized links, or automated linking. These are all unnatural links meant to manipulate rankings. At this point you can also use the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool to find unnatural links.
Step 3: Contact Website Owners
Use Apollo.io – a tool that helps you find the verified email addresses of the domains of those unnatural links you have just identified. A simple social media search can also help you find the email addresses.
Send a short and specific email to the site owner in question and request that they remove the unnatural links.
Step 4: Update Your List
Once site owners have removed unnatural links, update your list to reflect the changes. This helps you track the progress of your backlink cleanup efforts and ensures that you don’t disavow links that have already been removed.
In the process, you may encounter site owners who have not replied to your email or have asked for a fee for removal.
As John Mueller says, “If there are some links that you cannot remove yourself, or some that require payment to be removed, then having those in the disavow file is fine as well.”
Step 5: Disavow Links That Cannot Be Removed Manually
Once you have tried everything to remove those unnatural links yet have not succeeded, it’s okay to disavow the links.
Create a disavow file listing the URLs of the toxic links. You can follow Google’s detailed guidelines here.
Format your disavow.txt file and upload it to this website.
Step 6: Request a Reconsideration for Penalty Recovery
Once you have removed unnatural links and uploaded your disavow file, click on the “Request review” button in GSC.
Google will remove the manual action if it is convinced that you have taken every action needed to improve your website and rectify your mistakes.
Here’s how to remove toxic backlinks using SEMRush
Step 1: Go to SEMrush and click on Backlink Audit.
Step 2: Select ’60 to 100 toxic’ in the “toxicity score” dropdown filter to get the list of the most toxic backlinks.
Step 3: Select the most toxic links you are trying to remove and then click the “Remove” button.
Step 4: Use SEMrush’s built-in tool to send removal requests to website owners.
3 Best Practices for Preventing Bad Backlinks in the Future
Throughout the article we have established that toxic backlinks can have severe adverse effects and can damage your website’s reputation. Therefore, preventing incoming toxic backlinks from entering your websites is equally important as removing them.
Here are 3 best practices to help you ensure your backlink portfolio remains clean.
1. Implement Regular Ongoing Monitoring:
Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SE Ranking can help you check if the backlinks come from an authoritative domain. Regular monitoring can help you learn more about the linking page’s backlink profile and get a bird’s-eye view of your own backlink profile.
2. Create High-Quality, Link-Worthy Content:
Focus on producing high quality content, and you will be well on your way to building quality backlinks. The best practice is to take the long-term approach, i.e., creating content that’s, in a word, great.
Diversify and try different content formats such as – blog posts, infographics, and videos—to find out the type resonates the best with your audience and is popular within your niche.
As SEO expert Brian Dean says, websites need to build linkable content for link creators within their niche or industries. The better the content the better would be the domains linking back to your website.
3. Partner with a Trusted Link Building Agency:
Working with reliable & quality-focused link building agencies is imperative to maintain a clean backlink profile. Avoid services that promise quick or bulk link-building solutions, as these often lead to low-quality, toxic links.
Instead, partner up with teams that deliver relevance and value in every link they build.
At Digital SEO Land, our link-building strategy is built on ethical, white-hat practices that focus on creating meaningful, impactful backlinks. Collaborating with a partner who genuinely cares about long-term SEO value can make a significant difference in your site’s overall health and rankings.
Let us take care of your backlinks while you can focus on your other priorities. Jump on a 1:1 call with one of our link building experts today.
