Tips for Identifying Bad Backlinks

When it comes to the world of search engine optimization (SEO), the absolute biggest currency there is is back links. But did you know that not all back links are made equal? Yes, there is a distinction between good back links and bad back links and this article is here to give you tips for identifying bad backlinks.

Get Backlink Checking Software

The first tip is to actually get software to check all of the backlinks that populate your site. You will be looking for both inbound and outbound backlinks but pay special attention to the outbound ones.

In order to get backlinks software or to simply check the backlinks that you have through the a website, type into Google “Backlink check”. This should give you a list of results that should prove to be of value. A good tool comes from one of the most popular SEO sites around, MajesticSEO.com. You can subscribe to their service offered by them and get absolutely great results.

Identify Bad Backlinks

Now, once you have the tool(s) needed to check your backlinks, the next thing to do is see which ones are considered ‘bad’. Bad backlinks are links that seem suspicious or otherwise aren’t authentic. Obviously people looking to rank their site will look to dupe search engines by amassing tons of spam backlinks and so the distinction between good and bad consequently manifested.

Some of the things to be wary of when observing your links is:

• Links from fishy sites
• Too many links going to one page that would appear suspicious (low quality)
• Many links coming in from sites that you control

By eliminating links that fall under these types, you’ll be able to move forward in your campaign to rank high in search engines without being penalized because of bad backlinks.

Disavow Bad Backlinks

Once you’ve identified bad backlinks there is only one thing left to do, tell Google and other search engines to disavow the links so that you are protected from penalization. Doing so is rather simple and will be explained in this section.

Basically, to disavow links to your site, log on to Google’ Webmaster Tool and select the disavow feature, which can be seen here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main. This will take you to the service page where you can select the site that you want to operate on.

Once you’ve selected your site, you will need to upload a .txt file containing all of the links that you want to disavow. In the text file, comments are distinguished with a hashtag (#) sign, to disavow all links from a site use the ‘domain:’ keyword followed by the domain name, and lastly, lists the specific pages of a site without any special characters or keywords if you want to disavow them.

Conclusion

Low quality links, suspicious links, and spam links are all different types of links that you will need to disavow in order to help your site rank higher. First you want to get an idea of how many links you have going to your site and then you want to weed out the bad ones. After doing this disavow them so that you won’t be penalized by search engines. Oh, and one last thing, go over your outbound links and make sure that they reach a valid file or page–this also helps.