What's your strategy for dealing with harmful links?

Harmful links are links that point to your website from low-quality, spammy, or irrelevant sources. They can damage your reputation, lower your rankings, and expose you to penalties from search engines. That's why you need a strategy for dealing with them before they hurt your organic search performance. In this article, you'll learn how to identify, audit, and remove harmful links, and how to prevent them from accumulating in the future.

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1 Identify harmful links

The first step is to identify which links are pointing to your website and which ones could be potentially harmful. Tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush can provide a comprehensive list of your backlinks and their metrics. Harmful links can be identified by certain signs, like coming from unrelated or low-quality websites, having over-optimized or unnatural anchor texts, being hidden, cloaked, or injected by malware or hackers, or being part of a reciprocal or paid link scheme that violates Google's webmaster guidelines.

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Vasilis Vontikakis

Accountant & IT Consultant (System Integration, Web Development)
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Checking for harmful links is easy you just make a quick audit on your website using the command links:yourwebiste.com in Google search. Then you will find suspicious pages that link to your website in Google search results, that contain in their title tags keywords by title tags that have bad or negative meaning but they links to you your webiste. This could be also be seo negative spam attack.

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2 Audit harmful links

The next step is to analyze your harmful links and decide which ones you want to keep, remove, or disavow. Tools like Link Detox, Link Research Tools, or Majestic can be used to assess the risk and value of each link. When considering which links to keep, factors such as the domain authority, trust score, relevance of the linking website, number and diversity of the links from the same website or IP address, context, placement, content of the link and the surrounding page, as well as the traffic, engagement, and conversions generated by the link should be taken into consideration.

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Vasilis Vontikakis

Accountant & IT Consultant (System Integration, Web Development)
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This type of attack was in my web site where these type of links were targeting high traffic pages so to derank them where almost over 500 such as links

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3 Remove harmful links

The best way to deal with harmful links is to remove them from the source by contacting the webmasters or owners of the linking websites. You can use tools like Pitchbox, BuzzStream, or Ninja Outreach to find their contact information and send them personalized emails. When communicating, it's important to be friendly, professional, and respectful. Explain why you want the link removed and how it benefits both parties. Provide the exact URL of the link and the alternative you suggest, such as changing the anchor text or adding a nofollow attribute. Don't forget to follow up with a reminder if you don't get a response within a reasonable time.

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Vasilis Vontikakis

Accountant & IT Consultant (System Integration, Web Development)
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We had to remove manually using command like site: and links: in Google and also using ahrefs tool for backlinks. We have to disavow almost 900 such as links.

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4 Disavow harmful links

If you can't remove the harmful links from the source, you can disavow them from Google by using the disavow tool and submitting a file with the list of links or domains to ignore. It's important to be careful and selective when choosing which links to disavow, as it can negatively affect your rankings if you make a mistake. You should also use the domain: operator to disavow all links from a specific domain instead of listing individual URLs. Additionally, it's important to update and resubmit your disavow file regularly, as new harmful links may appear over time. Lastly, you should monitor your website's performance and traffic after disavowing links, and make adjustments if needed.

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5 Prevent harmful links

The final step is to prevent harmful links from accumulating in the future. You can use tools such as Google Alerts, Monitor Backlinks, or Linkody to track and monitor your backlinks and get notified of any changes or issues. To avoid harmful links, create and publish high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that will attract natural and organic links from reputable websites. Furthermore, build relationships with authoritative and trustworthy websites in your niche or industry, and offer them value in exchange for links. Additionally, stay away from shady or black-hat link building techniques such as buying, selling, or exchanging links, or using automated or spammy tools or services. Lastly, review and update your link profile regularly, and remove or disavow any harmful links as soon as you find them.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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What's your strategy for dealing with harmful links?

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1 Identify harmful links

2 Audit harmful links

3 Remove harmful links

4 Disavow harmful links

5 Prevent harmful links

6 Here’s what else to consider

Search Engine Optimization

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