Editorial Staff
While the ideal backlink profile is getting links from authority and good quality sites, you aren’t in control of what and how other website link to you.
Sometimes, all you get is all the toxic and spammy links that are coming from low quality sites.
Other scenario, you might have made mistake of hiring some shady SEO company that end up giving your site tons of bad backlinks with the risk of losing all your rankings.
Don’t worry, the good news is: it is still fixable!
In this module, you’ll going to learn about how to remove and clean up all these bad backlinks that are pointing to your site.
Why Disavow Bad Backlinks?
We all know that having bad backlink could do more harm than good.
If Google find that your site has lot of low quality and spam link, your site could end up get demoted from the search ranking.
The worst case, Google can penalized your site.
When you disavow the bad backlinks, it basically telling Google to ignore those backlinks on your domain.
If the disavow is successful, the bad backlinks won’t be counted as negative signal against your site when determining the ranking.
How to Identify Bad Backlinks?
To identify the quality of backlinks is based on the quality of the website they are on.
First you need Ahrefs account to access your backlink profile.
Once you login to your dashboard, click backlink profile > backlink on the left sidebar. Then, you can sort the DR from low to high.
Typically, a low quality and spammy site will have low number in DR, traffic and referring domains.
How to Disavow Bad Backlinks
After identifying and list down all the bad backlinks that are pointing to your site, it is time to disavow or clean them.
We do not recommend you to reach out every single site owner to remove the backlink to your site as it is required a lot of times, and most of the time the site owner will just ignore your request.
Instead, go to the Google Disavow Tool and submit all the bad backlinks.
To summarize, here is what you need to do for the disavow process:
- Step 1: Identify which links you want to disavow.
- Step 2: Create your list of links to disavow. Separate by URL and/or by domain.
- Step 3: Upload your disavow list as a .txt file to the Google Disavow Tool.
Please be noted that Google is not obligated to grant all your disavow request. It is basically just a “suggestion” to them.
Do The Backlink Profile Audit Regularly
These disavow bad backlinks process is not a one time process.
Instead, you need to keep on monitor all the new bad backlinks that are coming to your site.
We recommend you to do at least once per month to keep your backlink profile healthy.
