May 03, 2016 | 2 minute read

How to Remove Toxic Links

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By: Carrie Miller

Before we discuss removing toxic backlinks, we will first need to define a toxic backlink; what one is, and the damage it can do to your website ranking and traffic flow.  With Google and their Penguin Link Building Guidelines, a toxic link would fall into these situations:

• High number of sitewide links either located in headers, footers, or sidebars.
• High number of links with the same albeit generic anchor text.
• Number of backlinks are all a part of network links that come from the same domain/subnet/ip address.
• The linking page has an excessive amount of outgoing links.
• Too many backlinks from comments and guest posts.

Having a high number of toxic links will impact your website with SERP rankings, Google’s Penguin can penalize you and cause it to be removed from the Google database, all of this resulting in a massive drop in website traffic.

How to recognize Toxic Backlinks

I hear so often from customers that they are suddenly seeing a decrease in traffic and they have no idea why.  Well, the first thing I ask is have they been penalized by Google via Penguin for too many toxic backlinks.  Then comes the inevitable, “How do I know if I have toxic backlinks?”

Although this entire process is not simple, it is doable.  First off, get the list of your website’s backlinks.  This can be obtained from your Google Webmaster Tools or an outside source like SEOmoz.  Then you are going to need to look at each of those links to see where they are coming from.  If they fall into one of these categories you know they are toxic; spam sites or sites created for the purpose of link building, sites that contain malware of viruses, link networks, or sites which have not been indexed by Google.

You have determined you have toxic links, now what?

You have gone through the previous mentioned steps and have determined that you do have toxic links and they are impacting your website rankings and traffic, now it is time to remove them.  Before calling in the professionals, you can do a couple of things to clear this up.  First off, delete the links that you can yourself.  If that doesn’t work, try contacting those webmasters yourself and file a request for removal.  In the cases where there are numerous toxic backlinks, you can get in touch with Google directly disavow those links.  This would not be the recommended first step, but when all else fails… it can help.

When you have cleaned up the toxic mess, you will then need to file that reconsideration request with Google.  This request will need to outline the issues, the steps taken to correct the issues, and a pledge to follow better practices in the future.

This cleanup process is not fast and can actually takes weeks to over a month during which your site will be penalized by Google.  The best way to avoid this is to stay on top of the backlink audit.