What are Toxic Backlinks?
Toxic backlinks are links to your website from other websites that are either malicious, spammy, or otherwise very low quality. The idea behind this is that the association between your website and these untrustworthy sites will harm your rankings, as search engines may view your website as affiliated with these bad sites when evaluating your backlink profile.
Modern SEO tools such as SEMRush even have a list of so called “toxic markers” it screens your links against so you can remove them from your backlink profile.
Where do Toxic Backlinks Come From?
Toxic backlinks can come from many places. Sometimes they are the fault of the website owner or a marketing agency who chose to purchase backlinks in hopes of boosting their own website’s ranks. This is a blackhat SEO stratedgy that is historically known to backfire. They end up with hundreds of low quality links pointing to their site and search engines see this and ultimately demote them on the SERP.
Toxic backlinks can also come from previously good backlinks but the URL either expired or was sold to a website that went on to become unstrustworthy or malicious.
Finally, a certain number of toxic backlinks will always come from unknown origins. Large directory websites and other spammy websites will scour the web for links to add in a database and unsuspecting sites with unfortunately end up with these poor quality backlinks that could potentially harm their rankings.
Are toxic backlinks bad for SEO?
While many SEO tools will identify your toxic backlinks and suggest you remove them, they aren’t as bad as people think. Google does consider backlinks a ranking factor and “link spam” can trigger a manuel action against your site.
How to find and identify toxic backlinks
How to get rid of toxic backlinks
It is unlikely that you will be able to get your website removed from the source of the toxic backlink by outreach. If a site is low quality enough for the link to be considered toxic, there is likely not a real human behind it taking developer requests. That is where Google’s Dissavow tools comes in. The disavow tool removes the connection between you and any website linking to you that you provide. Google strongly cautions against using this tool without absolute certainty because removing backlinkd can harm your rankings unless you are positive those links are hurting your SEO.
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies