There have been mixed opinions amongst the online marketing community over the years regarding whether or not you should disavow bad backlinks pointing to your site.
While some SEO (search engine optimisation) professionals argue that removing these links is necessary to maintain a clean backlink profile, others believe that Google’s algorithms are smart enough to ignore low-quality links without any manual intervention.
Google’s ever-evolving algorithms make it hard to keep up – but is this something you need to worry about?
What are ‘bad’ backlinks?
Backlinks are links pointing from other websites to yours. When these backlinks come from reputable and relevant sources, they can help improve the visibility of your website in search rankings.
Not all backlinks are beneficial to the SEO performance of your site, however. ‘Bad’ backlinks often come from spammy, low-quality or irrelevant sites, and can potentially harm your site.
Typical examples of ‘bad’ backlinks can include link farms, which are networks of websites designed solely to link to each other in an attempt to manipulate search engines, or backlinks from malicious sites, which can harm the security of your site.
What happens if you have bad backlinks?
Google’s search algorithm is designed to ignore most bad backlinks, so in many cases, you won’t need to do anything. However, in rare cases, if your site has a large number of spammy, low-quality or irrelevant backlinks, they can lead to penalties.
If Google detects that your site has an excessive number of bad backlinks pointing to it, your website may lose its position in the search results – or worse, won’t appear in the search results at all.
When should you disavow bad backlinks?
In their Search Console Help interface, Google recommends disavowing backlinks only if:
1. “You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site,
AND
2. The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.”
If your website receives a manual action penalty, you’ll receive a notification through Google Search Console.
Manual actions occur when Google’s team manually reviews your site and determines that its backlinks are being used to manipulate search rankings.
To resolve this and prevent your website from losing visibility in the search engine results page, you may need to disavow the harmful backlinks.
You can find Google’s guidelines on how to disavow a backlink here.
For most websites, it’s not necessary to disavow backlinks. Google automatically ignores most bad backlinks without any action required.
It’s important to remember that Google recommends only using the disavow tool if you’re dealing with, or likely to deal with, a manual action penalty.
While it is worth keeping an eye on the backlink profile of your site, efforts would be better spent focusing on obtaining high-quality links from relevant and reputable sources.
Need help identifying if your site has received a manual action penalty? Reach out to the team at Engage Web today.
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