To figure out whether or not it’s time to disavow backlinks on your page, you’ll need to determine once and for all what the quality of your links is. If you have hundreds or thousands of backlinks, you properly need a link disavow tool.
You will learn:
- The need to disavow backlinks.
- Types of bad backlinks that you should disavow.
- How to disavow links effectively
- Way to use BacklinkGao to create your disavow list.
Disavow link is a proactive approach that entails regularly checking your backlinks to ensure your links do not come from spammy, low-quality web pages. With the number of backlinks you have, finding the “alarming” backlink to disavow is not so easy.
A link disavow tool can help you minimize any negative SEO impact.
Read on to learn how you can disavow bad backlinks and ensure that your webpage remains appealing to Google crawlers and readers!
The need to disavow backlinks.
The second most important Google ranking factor is backlinks. Thus, in five years, 92% of marketers believe that links will still be the ranking criteria in Google algorithms. When the search engine evaluates your page, the number of links and quality of links pointing to your site is taken into account. In order to rank higher, the quantity of backlinks is not enough, you still need to make sure about the quality of backlinks.
If there are a lot of quality sites with backlinks to your site, that’s great. It tells the search engine that reknown sites find your site reputable, too. It’s like the sites that Google has already deemed reputable are giving your site a thumb’s up.
On the other hand, if you have a lot of backlinks from low-quality sites, that can be bad for your SEO. Successful link building is about focusing on quality over quantity, and low-quality links can significantly hurt your rankings and organic traffic. Unnatural links were the target of Google Penguin algorithm update, one which changed the link-building landscape for the better.
Bad links can damage your site’s SEO if you don’t remove them. That’s where you need to disavow backlinks.
Types of bad backlinks that you should disavow.
If you have never disavowed any backlinks, you can get confused about how to know which are the bad backlinks. Below are the four examples for you.
#1. Paid Links:
After all, using paid links is lazy link building.
Paid link-building manipulates Google’s algorithm and is a low effort yet extremely high-risk tactic. When money changes hands in exchange for a link, you are straight-up violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes paying sponsorship fees for guest posts, as well as gifting products or services in exchange for a link. If a link is paid for, it has not been editorially placed.
Most paid-for links end up coming from sites that are not topically aligned, which have a high count of outbound links and are generally low quality. Aside from this risk, don’t forget that if you can buy links, so can your competitor.
Since it is a no-go from an SEO perspective, you need to make sure to add rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attributes for full transparency and avoid the links being identified as unnatural.
#2. Private Blog Networks
A private blog network (PBN) is a black hat link-building tactic that involves building and maintaining a collection of sites that are used for the primary purpose of adding in links to other sites. They are usually developed from expired domains, which are repurposed.
Many black hat SEOs would argue that a truly private blog network would never be discovered by Google. However, the issue is that many are easy to spot by experienced SEOs. Therefore, Google itself may appear to be natural to an everyday web user.
#3. Comment Spam
Another legacy link-building tactic that is associated with toxic links is comment spam.
These comments are often automated using software that places large numbers of irrelevant comments on blogs. The hope is that some go through without moderation, and the goal is simply to try and land as many links in comments as possible.
#4. Exact Match Anchor Text Links
Links that use exact match (keyword rich) anchor text are often toxic, largely regardless of the source.
Most people wouldn’t naturally link to an online clothing store using a link text of “buy cheap shirts.” They would be far more likely to link using the brand name or domain. If there is excessive use of keyword-rich anchor text, it is a potential flag that you are paying for links or that they are not editorially placed.
Ìf you are not 100% sure if a backlink should stay or if it needs to go? Ask yourself these three questions:
- Is the link relevant to my website and my visitors?
- Does this link have a purpose beyond SEO?
- Can this link bring legitimate traffic to my site?
How to disavow links properly?
#1. Start by compiling a list of backlinks.
Any backlink analysis must begin with aggregating as much relevant backlink data as possible.
There are many ways to do this, but you can start with tools like Google Search Console. The first way to check your backlink profile is by using Google Search Console. If you don’t have this already, install it as soon as possible. Open the Google Search Console and scroll down to the menu and select ‘Links’. It will give you a breakdown of all the top external links directed to your website.
Or you can use a third-party tool like BacklinkGap. I will talk about this amazing tool in the next part.
#2. Identify bad backlinks.
Once the full list of unique backlinks has been generated, it’s time to identify bad backlinks. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do this. One way of judging backlinks is manually visiting each one and evaluating whether or not the link is sensible and genuinely useful. If it seems like it is, Google probably isn’t penalizing it, so there’s no reason to disavow it. On the other hand, if the site seems suspicious, that’s a good reason to try and remove it.
Tools and algorithms are great, sometimes you have to see the outlying cause of your link penalty with your own eyes. Who knows, maybe you’ll get insight into how you can avoid future trouble.
However, manually investigating the sites linking to your page can be time-consuming, and it is also not accurate. If you don’t have that many bad links, you should take the time to visit each link. But what if you have thousands of backlinks?
Don’t simply invalidate links at random. As Google said, you can damage your own SEO through costly mistakes, and you want to avoid that. You need to understand what you are messing with before you dive in head-first.
#3. Contact whoever owns the site and ask for that link to be removed.
Once you’ve decided to try and remove a link, contact whoever owns the site and ask for that link to be removed. You can write an email to the site owner and politely request they remove the link in question. You should be professional in your approach and clear in your purpose.
You should reach out to them around three times and clearly document each of these attempts. This is usually enough to get the link removed.
If this way is not effective, then move to the next steps.
#4. Ask Google to disavow it. Use Google Search Console
If the site’s owner fails to respond or refuses to remove the link, you can ask Google to disavow it. You can include the documentation showing that you asked the other site to remove it and they did not comply. Google almost always honors disavow requests that include such documentation (But it also takes a lot of time.)
Once you are done assessing your links you can create the disavow.txt file that will be uploaded to Google Search Console.
Below are some guidelines from Google on how to create your file.
- The file name must end in .txt
- File size can be no larger than 2MB and 100,000 lines
- Each URL should be on its own line
- If you want to disavow a whole domain you should start the line with domain:
- If you want to disavow a URL you can just enter the URL
Remember that you cannot undo a disavow. Once you choose to disavow links, it is disassociated from your site. Be sure to do your research on the external site before choosing to disavow it.
The use of a link disavow tool – BacklinkGap
You should only use the Google Disavow Tool like Google Search Console if you have enough experience to evaluate a website. You can damage your backlink profile if you’re wrong about an external link, it’s important to have knowledge about what makes a site spammy or harmful.
Using a tool like BacklinkGap can support you in the first two steps, saving tons of time checking the quality of the backlinks.
With BacklinkGap, you can:
- Know your referring domain: Uncover where your backlinks come from and the quality and trustworthiness of them.
- Manage disavowed links: Efficiently identify and compile unwanted backlinks to disavow.
- Identify spammy websites: Uncover suspicious domains that might be practicing spammy backlinks from your backlink profile.
Besides the features that help you to disavow links like above, you can also use BacklinkGap to:
- Discover your backlink profile strength: You can see the value and authoritativeness of all your backlinks. The friendship score stands for the number & the quality of backlinks you have. The higher the score you have, the better your websites are.
- Backlink Monitoring: You can identify the movement of all the backlinks pointing to you. You can see the history daily, weekly and monthly. The status of the backlink is also at the top of the dashboard.
- Know your backlink types
- Discover your competitors’ profile
Link-building tactics for you to avoid bad backlinks
Prevention is better than cure. You need to make sure your link-building tactics bring good outcomes, rather than seeking more backlinks without thinking about the quality. It is to give your sites a great picture in the search engine eye and save your time from disavowing a lot of links.
Monitor your backlinks regularly
Tracking the activity of your backlink profile is very crucial in terms of effective SEO analysis. This is to either get rid of spammy links or track new and lost backlinks every day.
If you don’t monitor your backlinks consistently, spammy backlinks can make their way into your backlink profile. If you don’t monitor regularly, you will not be able to solve your backlinks problem as soon as possible.
Use backlink building tactics like:
It is critical that you be aware of the link-building tactics that can lead to toxic backlinks. Try these tactics to help you get more quality backlinks.
Guest blogging
High-quality guest blogging, on the other hand, is not only alive and well, but also remains highly effective.
The concept itself behind Guest Blogging is pretty simple. At its core, it’s about sharing your expertise in an article to be published on someone else’s website.
As a byproduct of sharing content that is authentic, valuable, and unique – you’ll be able to get a backlink that points back to your website, or your client’s website.
When done right, guest blogging is considered to be a White Hat technique for link building. And it’s an extremely effective technique used by professional writers and SEO agencies to drive traffic and influence rankings.
Broken link building
This method involves replacing broken links pointing to nowhere by swapping them out for your link. So if an article is linking to maybe an old resource that doesn’t exist anymore, you could reach out to the author and offer your link as a replacement.
Improve site content quality
The better your content is, the more backlinks you’ll be able to earn.
Backlinks from a long blog post—anything over about 1000 words—will have a greater impact on SEO than a link from a short blurb.
A lot of content gets ignored, but there are some types that, regardless of the subject matter, receive more attention than the others.
Regular blog articles perform OK, but the following formats tend to blow them away in terms of views:
- List articles
- Quizzes
- “How to” articles
- Infographics
- Videos
TL;DR
Knowing which links to invalidate can get really tricky, but it’s an important step before using a link disavow tool. Luckily BacklinkGap is here to help.
Remember to export the disavow list into files and send it to Google Search Console to “say goodbye” to the bad backlinks.
