Why Should We Avoid Toxic Backlinks in 2021?

Search engine optimization is an integral part of digital marketing, especially during the global pandemic.

Using SEO tactics, you can increase your visibility and drive more traffic to your website, generating more sales.

Of course, achieving good traffic with the help of standard SEO techniques is a time-consuming task, and as a result, many marketers and website moderators use unusual methods. These methods are definitely dangerous for your site's long-term health score.

Getting toxic backlinks is one of the most damaging approaches many SEO managers take. Although backlinks are essential for SEO, you should not say yes to potential backlinks from external pages.

Since getting toxic backlinks has become a common means of traffic growth, it is good to review what they are and why they are harmful to your website.

Good Backlinks

Good backlinks are those that come from quality, related articles on high authority websites. These links lead to a greater flow of trust and also a flow of appointments.

With the help of good backlinks, your site's authority will increase and your articles will rank for specific keywords.

In other words, the more good backlinks you get for a single page on your site, the better it will rank in Google

Here are some metrics to know if a link is good:

1. Relevancy

You have to extract the keywords that a site ranks in Google to know if it is in your niche. You shouldn't just rely on the categories that the site has on the home page because they might have ranked for some unwanted keywords.

2. Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric defined by MOZ and is a good factor in knowing if a site is good for link building. The higher the DA, the better.

3. Spam Score

This is another metric defined by MOZ and is a measure of how spammy a site is. In fact, MOZ estimates the percentage of similar sites that have been penalized by Google and displays the site's spam score accordingly.

4. Organic traffic

Traffic is one of the most important metrics to know if a site is performing well and shows how many users find and visit the site through search engine searches.

5. Age

The age of a website is also of great importance when it comes to credibility. You can check this from many online tools like SEO Checker.

Apart from these factors, you can also consider the competition and the website design. Valid fonts typically have high-quality graphics and professional website architecture.

Also, the content creation method can show the quality of a site. For example, if a site accepts users and publishes its content without any review, it cannot be trusted and is very likely to provide a toxic backlink.

On the other hand, if a website has a team of full-time professional content creators, your content will definitely gain rank on Google and your backlinks are valuable.

Bad Backlinks

Bad backlinks come from low-quality websites and can significantly damage your Trust Flow, while your Citation Flow can still increase.

You should avoid this if you want to become a niche thought leader and have stable organic traffic.

Some Types of Toxic Backlinks

Here are some examples of websites and sources you need to avoid getting backlinks from:

• Press releases

• Discussion forums

• Foreign guestbooks

• PBNs (Private Blog Networks)

• Social bookmarks

• Directory services

• What to Do?

Now that you know the consequences of getting backlinks, you should review your previous SEO strategies to avoid further trouble.

The question is whether we should think about removing the old toxic backlinks. The answer is yes. You must find these backlinks and remove them from your backlink profile.

First, you need to recognize toxic backlinks using a tool. Fortunately, there are a handful of famous tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush, with which you can flag all links that are considered toxic based on their metrics.

That's a great step because you can easily remove them when you find the toxic backlinks. Next, you need to contact the webmaster and simply ask him to remove the links.

Also, you have to create a disavow file and submit it to Google to get it to ignore those links. This way, the detrimental effects of those links will be eliminated after a while, and you can track the health score of your website to make sure about the result.

Read More:- What is Digital Marketing?