Toxic backlinks - poison for your website SEO

There can be various reasons why a link becomes toxic.

Often, domains with very low authority also provide low quality links. These may be pages that are not indexed at all or pages with a non-existent backlink profile. They can also be pages dedicated to porn/gambling etc.

A good way to see a domain's authority is to use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush - here you just enter the website into the tool and it will show a DR (domain rating). If the domain rating is below 10, it will require a review of the domain/link and you should investigate whether it should be removed.

It may be multiple copies or clones of websites (with different URLs) all linking to your website. They usually use exactly the same anchor text, have the same page layout, etc.

Google will consider these pages as duplicate pages with the sole purpose of building a larger link profile to its own domain.

PBN is a method of building and maintaining a collection of websites whose sole purpose is to create backlinks to other websites - typically old, expired domains that are being acquired restored.

Many SEO specialists would argue that Google is never going to detect a PBN. However, Google has been actively tracking PBNs for many years, and has penalised sites as far back as 2014. Ultimately, Google will catch the PBN, and their punishment can be quite devastating to the website's rankings.

Now you know what a toxic link is and what makes it toxic - but how do toxic links get detected by Google?

If you discover a toxic link, or link network, you can use Google's disavow feature, which can be found here.

Here you need to upload a .txt file listing the toxic links (or domains).
The formatting should look like this:

As mentioned earlier, Google has continuously documented in recent years how their algorithm has become better at distinguishing between toxic links and even claims that the search engine can ignore low quality links as well as toxic links

The team from Ahrefs put this to the test back in December 2021, when they simply tried to disavow ALL 3,476 backlinks to three of their very large blogposts.

The study was to test whether links actually affected rankings. Interestingly, they immediately saw a drop in traffic and rankings on their three blog posts, with one of them losing 18% of its traffic from search, and some of their rankings had dropped from 1st to 4th place.

This study shows how important your backlink profile can be for your website. Just think what a strong backlink profile could do if your website was ranked fourth with good content and a strong technical profile, but had no backlink profile.

Just because Google claims their algorithm can differentiate between low quality and toxic links doesn't mean we should throw in the towel.

However, you can get a sense of this when the subject is discussed so much. In a twitter poll from January 2021, it turns out that 32% of respondents don't think disavows were an important tool anymore. Of those surveyed, 42% thought it depended on the situation. I understand that.

For me personally, having worked with backlink profiles for several years, I believe that we need to keep a constant eye on our backlink profiles, where we should use the disavows tool if things are really bad with the backlink profile.

We can't ignore the fact that there are lots of spam links out there, and even if Google is getting better at spotting these links, we also need to keep an eye on the evolution of our backlink profile to avoid manual actions. For example, if you see a link network or mirror pages linking to your site, it's a good idea to upload these to the disavow page to ensure they are ignored rather than blindly relying on Google's algorithm.

But be careful! The Disavow tool must be used with care. As Google itself writes:

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site's performance in Google Search results.

One thing is for sure: if you are not 100% sure whether a link can harm your website, just don't disavow it.

Does it seem too long-winded to have to identify and reject toxic links? At Webamp , as a SEO agency, we specialise in link building and best practices for SEO. So if you're concerned about your website's backlink profile, don't hesitate to get in touch.