Back in the olden days of digital marketing, people would sometimes create high numbers of links to a website to increase its position in the search engines.
Quite often, a lot of these links tended to be low quality – meaning they were from websites created with no other purpose other than to link to you.
Now, Google is smarter. It’s therefore thought that these links can negatively impact your ranking; so, if you have a high number of spammy links, you’ll want to remove them.
The first point to note, however, is that you don’t want to go to any of these websites to remove these links yourself.
We’ve put together a handy, quickfire guide detailing what to do if you’ve found yourself in either of the following positions:
I have a high volume of spammy backlinks – what should I do?
If you have a large number of toxic backlinks (in the thousands) pointing towards your website, you can ask Google to disavow them.
This process involves creating a list of URLs you want to remove and uploading them to Google – meaning they will no longer negatively impact your ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
You can find more information about this process here.
I only have a few toxic backlinks pointing towards me – can I just ignore them?
If the number of spammy backlinks pointing towards your site is more in the region of a couple of hundred, rather than in the thousands, then it’s not something you really need to worry about.
This is due Google’s Penguin update back in 2012, which was set up with the intention of tackling spam (a category in which poor quality backlinks falls).
For peace of mind, you may find it useful to navigate to the left-hand side of the Google Search Console, where you’ll find a section called “Manual Actions”.
If this is empty, you shouldn’t need to worry about those back links affecting your website.
If, however, it says you have a Manual Action required for spam links, then this is something you’ll need to look into removing, as it could well be impacting your ranking.
Here at Engage Web, we stay on top of the latest trends in digital marketing. We also have our own training platform, EngageWeb.Club, where we release useful videos covering topics like these in more depth.
Why not join today, and become part of the club!
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