How to Identify and Remove Bad Backlinks?

There are loads of aspects that help a website rank better with search engines such as Google among others. Algorithms and other formulas calculate how your website ranks. Typically, when a person searches for a specific term on these search engines it pulls up results for the term that is searched. There is not one particular aspect that can affect your website’s rankings. However, bad backlinks are certain to harm your website and its rankings.

What are spam backlinks?

Any link that comes from websites that are not trustworthy is categorized as bad backlinks or spam backlinks. This was a program modified by Google way back in 2012 with a program called Penguin Algorithms. Before the change, there were lots of websites that used loopholes with the use of black hat SEO techniques. The crackdown by Google effectively checked websites that use it to their advantage to attain more traffic to a specific website.

Methods for removing bad backlinks

There are a few methods that you can use to remove these backlinks that affect the ranking or rating of your website.

1. Contacting the website owner:

This is typically the easiest way to get a bad backlink removed. You would have to find out which of the websites is affecting your ranking and contact them to have it removed.

2. Contact Google:

You can practically tell the search engine not to take the links into consideration while assessing your website. This can be done when you are unable to establish contact with the website owner from where the bad backlinks

3. Remove error pages:

This method works by removing those websites that have a 404 or 410 error while visiting them. This means that you would be disavowing these backlinks that give your website a bad rating.

4. Restart all over again:

If the above-mentioned methods are not helping you, it is better if you shut down your website and start it all over again. This process can only be done if you have not gone full fledge into getting your website to generate traffic and have customers.

If you can get any of these steps to work there would be better chances of your website getting ranked better with Google. You may lose traffic to your website for a while but experts believe that this is the best way forward for most of the websites that are legitimate.