What To Do About Low Value, Bad, or Spam Backlinks

Key Takeaways

quick tip is that you can get really obsessed over bad quality links and we have people come to exposure ninja with their hair on fire screaming help me I've got all these bad links what can I possibly do what's up people Tim from exposure ninja here and in this video we're gonna be looking at bad backlinks what is a bad backlink and what do you need to do about it firstly to give a bit of context backlink to an incredibly important part of SEO whilst things like content are extremely important backlinks are still one of the main ways that Google understands and measures authority of any given website so in order to rank prominently for competitive searches usually some nice juicy backlinks pointing at your website but not all backlinks are friendly know some are just pure evil and historically bad backlinks have been responsible for dragging web sites down in rankings in fact I remember one of my very first clients when I started exposure ninja was a business that had just been completely decimated by a Google ranking algorithm update as a result of bad links that they had built so bad backlinks at various points in SEO history have been very very bad news so many of these bad links are created by websites automatically that just scrape and post content some are created by nefarious competitors nefarious of wording that's a word I'm trying to damage your ranking by building links on junky crappy web sites in order to get you penalized this is known as negative SEO that negative SEO is rife in some markets we have a client in a very competitive space and their website is constantly being pummeled by bad links from competitors trying to damage their rankings now it's not doing too much damage and we're on the case was submitting disavow files which we'll come to in just a second but Google's ranking algorithms over the years have become more sophisticated and more able to distinguish bad links from good links so really usually the risk of a bad link actually hurting your ranking is much lower because Google's now simply ignoring those links previously before Google is able to distinguish oftentimes you would get a manual penalty where someone from Google's webspam team would have a look at your links and say oh there's been some naughty stuff going along here and stick a big old penalty on you which would strip you down in ranking and then Google brought out something called the disavow file and with the disavow file you could upload a list of all the links that you wanted Google to ignore into Google search console or webmaster tools as it was then known and Google said yeah we'll probably ignore these now some cynical people the cynic thought that the whole disavow file was a bit of a joke and designed by Google to really teach it's machine learning algorithm what a low-quality website was because all these diligent website owners went out there and compiled their disavow files of all the spammy websites that they didn't want links from submitted them to the disavow file and then Google said yeah we may or may not use this and then obviously it was teaching the machine learning algorithm what low-quality websites look like with all of this data so that the algorithm can learn to ignore these links in future those cynics what a wacky theory nevertheless it's still a good idea to take a look every so often at your link profile to see if there are any low-quality links in there and then do what you can to remove them either by contacting the website owners and asking them to remove them which is a little bit like contacting the busiest person on earth who doesn't care about the thing that you're asking them to do and asking them to do something time-consuming with absolutely no upside for them ie there's a pretty low success rate I keep in mind that most of these websites were started by someone a very long time ago they make no money for them whatsoever and the links were put there by a spammy robot this person then has to go in and manually find your link and remove it without any form of compensation whatsoever so generally asking people to remove spammy links has a pretty low success rate so your next option is to submit a disavow file which we'll talk about in a minute but first of all let's have a look and see what constitutes a spammy link now at explosion engine use a range of different tools to identify what a spammy link might be we use things like majestic semrush which you can get a free trial of at Thank You ninjas comm and also Moses link Explorer as well as Google's own search console which will show some of the links that are pointing into your site so it's a good idea to use a whole range of different tools to get a full picture of the links coming into your website what I'm gonna do now is we're just gonna head over to link explorer and we're gonna do a little bit of spam hunting now you've got to be careful when you're spam hunting because sometimes the spam enos can splash onto you and cause blindness or evil I'm just gonna Don my spam proof glasses there we go and you'll notice that I've double glassed here to give myself extra protection from the evilest of spammy links so we're just gonna head over to link explorer and we're just gonna stick in any old website so here I'm just looking at the Google's own website let's see if they've got any spammy links if they've been doing anything naughty so what we're just gonna do is just gonna click on the spam score now the spam score is a pretty kind of crude metric by Moz as many of their metrics are did I say that but what it's designed to do is give a bit of an indication about how low-quality the sites are that are linking in so we can see here all of the low-quality links that are linking into Google and some of them are you know your classic old favorites like xn - - B 1 AMD CWM CH e JV 8 IX n - - P 1 dot AI which I know is everyone's favorite website so let's just have a look at this bad boy and see what sort of thing is happening here so this doesn't exactly look like the best web site in the world in fact the web site is dead because the domain has expired so a lot of these kind of low end links will be that type of thing because these web sites are no longer viable because they serve absolutely no purpose now that this sort of low-quality link building is dead but down here you can see a whole bunch of different web sites with slightly strange domains things like nine four nine eight three seven com now in 2010 we would have said that is a great backlink but in 2019 that is just a pilot junk that doesn't really serve any purpose at all and you'll see that a lot of these sites they appear to look legitimate but actually there's kind of no purpose for them and you've got to ask yourself who is this website designed for and what is it all about is it actually used by real people or is it just complete rubbish and usually if you have like an eight digit number as your domain name then it's total rubbish some of them don't have the greatest load times either so what we'll often do is we'll compile a full list of all of this sort of rubbish link and we'll put it in a big old spreadsheet and that will form the basis of our disavow file now when it comes to submitting a disavow file honestly the best thing to do is google disavow file and then there's two things that you want to have a look at the first one is a support article on google.com where they teach you how to submit the disavow file so here you've got the kind of structure of a disavow file so it's basically domain colon and then the domain of the website that you want to disavow you want to put that all into a big old txt file and then head back to Google and go to the disavow Google thing and here inside the search console you'll be able to choose the website that you want to disavow links for and then click on that big old disavow links button and then it will allow you to upload your disavow file and then it will tell you how many URLs you have in that disavow file and when it's being processed final quick tip is that you can get really obsessed over bad quality links and we have people come to exposure ninja with their hair on fire screaming help me I've got all these bad links what can I possibly do 99% of the time there is absolutely no issue on what they'd be much better off doing is focusing on creating amazing content on their site and getting some good quality links instead if you've got like 5% of your links are junk I wouldn't honestly I wouldn't even worry about it if a hundred percent of your links are total rubbish and the numbers increasing every day then you probably want to submit a disavow file or look into what's happening but for the vast majority of people this stuff just isn't an issue every website picks up junk links it doesn't mean that you're being negative SEO Dorrit and if your website has lost loads of ranking the likelihood is is not because of bad links these days so I hope you found this video on bad links useful I hope you can sleep a little easier at night knowing that you're probably not the brunt of a brutal negative SEO attack but if you feel like you are and you want some help then you can request a free marketing review and even if you're not feeling like you're being pounded by your competitors through a brutal negative SEO campaign you just want some help improving your ranking then request a free SEO and website review from the ninjas here at exposure ninja by going to WWE and enjoy calm clicking that big old free review button one of the team will take a look at your website your rankings and even your links as well and they'll give you recommendations for the things to focus on over the next 6 to 12 months in a video format it's completely free and it is so amazing so I encourage you to do that if you haven't already don't forget to Like and subscribe the video and you can also check out the exposure ninja digital marketing podcast where I interview some of the brightest digital marketing minds in the world and we go behind the scenes of the world's most successful digital marketing campaigns until the next video keep disavowing my humble friends