The Best Way to Indentify Unhealthy SEO Backlinks
You may be considering removing the low quality backlinks from your website? Yes, that is a great decision. Regardless of whether you have been punished before or not, it is vital to track and get control over your backlink choice.
How to determine bad links to your site or blog
In order to check the links on your site, you will need to login to your account – Monitor Backlinks, that is. Click on Backlinks from the menu on the left. In case you have not included your domain, you will need to do so. Visit http://scanbacklinks.com/ to go through our quick tutorial in case you are uncertain on how to get started.
Once you click on the backlink button, the entire list containing your links will be displayed. The number of links that pass for quality and those without any SEO value (nofollow and the links Google disregards) will be shown on the Monitor Backlink page on the left. Clicking the green icon will prompt the table to display only the links with an “OK” status; hence, dofollow links.
In the event you trying to find inbound links pointing to your homepage or particular pages, you will need to click on “Filters” on the top right and select your root domain. Using the same technique, you can also look for links pointing to a certain page on your website. Having done that, you may now analyze your inbound links and come up with a list of those you think are of no SEO value. But in case your backlink profile is huge; the steps below could be of great help.
- Categorize them by anchor text and physically single out the ones you deem suspicious
- With regard to the pages they are linked to, list them. In case your site contains too many links directing to the homepage, it would be wise to substantiate them first.
- Classify the links basing on the social media network shares. You will realize that most bad links have no shares. Try to find out which one first.
Common bad links
- Automated comments coming from unauthorized sites
- Social bookmarking sites
- Links emanating from pages containing inadequate info
- Link directories
- Backlinks derived from sites containing copied content
- Links coming from unrelated sites and info
One important thing to note here is that it may not be easy to identify all these backlinks as some are concealed from readers or emanate from images. Somehow, you will need to find them. How? To begin with, try to look for the anchor text contained in the link. In your browser, press and hold CTRL+F and paste the phrase you are searching for. The link location will be shown on your browser.
However, if the anchor text does not appear through this technique, you will be forced to search the source of the page. If you are using Mozilla or Chrome, click on the right button and choose “View Page Source”. Using the CTRL once more, but in the stead of searching for the anchor text, insert the URL to your site. Your browser will indicate the location of your backlink on that particular page. Confirm in case the link is one of those dubbed as bad links above. If it falls into this category, remove it. The best way you can use to find a bad link later for editing, is by adding a tag once you have located it.
Repeat this process to ensure that you have located all the bad links likely to impact negatively on your site’s rankings. If you want to access the links with tags, simply move to Filters – Tags and choose “Spam”. The process is likely to take a considerable amount of time if your links are many; but, you must first focus on the links that have no social media shares.
How to eliminate bad links from your website
- The first step is reaching out to webmasters and requesting them to eliminate the bad link to your site. Remember to act respectfully and nicely when telling them to delete the link.
- Chances are that someone may not respond to your email but this shouldn’t scare you, you can still find a solution from the remaining options.
- You can choose to get in touch with their hosting firm, and ask them to take away the link since a site they are hosting is proving spammy on your site. If you want to find out who the host company is, go to com.
- The Google Disavow Tool comes in as the last option. Visit us at http://scanbacklinks.com/ to learn how you can use Monitor Backlinks effectively.
Bottom line – While backlinks are vital in SEO, it is important to keep your site clean and free from the bad links that are likely to land you in trouble with search engines.