How to Recover from the Negative Effects of Bad Backlinks

Backlinks can help your website rank higher on search engines, but they can also harm your website if they come from low-quality, spammy, or irrelevant sources.

These are called bad backlinks, and they can lower Google’s rating of your website and kill your ranking. In this article, we will show you how to recover from the negative effects of bad backlinks and how to prevent them in the future.

You will also learn how to identify bad backlinks, remove or disavow them, and build good backlinks that boost your authority and trustworthiness. Read on to find out more.

A. Audit Your Backlink Profile

The first step is to identify where the bad backlinks are coming from. These links come from spammy, irrelevant, or untrustworthy sources that may harm your reputation and rankings.

Conduct the audit using the Eye10 Backlink Monitor, which shows you real-time information about your backlinks’ origin, status, and quality. Simply create a group and import the links you want to monitor.

If you want to examine all the backlinks to your website, then you should have used the Eye10 Backlink Checker before getting the list exported into a .csv file.

B. Contact the Link Owners

Once you have discovered the erring links, find out the contact details of the website owners where the links are coming from and reach out to them to request that they politely remove the links. You can use a template like this:

Dear webmaster,

I’m contacting you because I found a link on your website pointing to my website: [your website URL]. Unfortunately, this link is harming my site’s ranking and reputation, and I would appreciate it if you could remove it as soon as possible.

The link is located on this page: [page URL with the bad link].

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

Best regards,

[Your name]

When you write the webmaster this way, you would probably get a response if there was a genuine mistake somewhere. The bad backlinks are most likely negatively affecting the other website too, which may lead the owner to take quick action to rectify the issue.

On the other hand, if you are dealing with a case of spam or some other deliberate malicious intent, you wouldn’t get a response. If you even get a response, they may demand that you pay them a fee for them to remove it.

Do not fall for this tactic. Instead, it is recommended that you wait two weeks before taking the next step.

C. Google Disavow Tool

If you don’t get a response or a positive outcome from contacting the webmasters, you can use Google’s disavow tool to tell Google that you don’t want those links to be counted.

This webmaster tool allows you to tell Google to ignore certain incoming links to your website for ranking purposes. It’s simply a way of preventing the actions of some websites from hurting or negatively affecting your website’s rankings.

Follow these steps to use the Google Disavow tool:

• Create a list of links or domains you want to disavow in a text file. The file should have one URL or domain per line.
• Upload the file to Google Search Console. You need to select your website and click on “Disavow links.” Then, click “Choose file” and select the file you created. Click on “Submit” and confirm your action.
• Wait for Google to process your request and update its index. Depending on how many links you have disavowed, this may take several weeks or months.

D. Exercise Patience

The Google disavow tool is not a magic bullet that will fix all your ranking problems. It might seem that things have gotten worse at first, especially when you notice fluctuations or drops in your traffic and rankings.

You should not panic or try to undo your disavowed action if you don’t see immediate results. The Google Disavow tool will not instantly boost your site’s performance.

Rather, it is a preventive measure to help avoid future penalties and negative effects from bad backlinks. You should also continue to monitor your site’s analytics and backlink profile to make sure that you are not losing any valuable links or gaining any new bad ones.

For best results, you should only use the Disavow tool after exhausting other options like contacting the webmasters.

How to Prevent Bad Backlinks in the Future

More important than recovering from bad backlinks is to prevent them from becoming an issue in the first place. Some ways to prevent bad external links in the future are:

• Focus on creating high-quality content that attracts natural and relevant links from reputable sources. This is the best way to build a strong and healthy link profile to boost your site’s authority and performance.
• Avoid using shady link-building tactics or services that promise quick and easy links. These may include buying links, exchanging links, participating in link schemes or networks, using automated tools or software, etc. These methods violate Google’s guidelines and result in a penalty or a negative impact on your rankings.
• Build relationships with other webmasters and bloggers in your niche or industry who may be interested in linking to your site. This guarantees you can get quality and organic links through methods like guest posting.
• Monitor your backlink profile regularly and use the Eye10 Backlink Checker to detect any new or suspicious links that may appear.

Conclusion

Following the detailed steps above will improve your website’s performance, visibility, and credibility online. Hopefully, this article has helped you understand how to recover from the negative effects of bad backlinks and how to avoid them in the future.

In all of this, the importance of using a reliable SEO tool for checking and monitoring backlinks cannot be overemphasized. This is what you get when you sign up to gain access to Eye10 SEO tools. With a single subscription, you also access other tools for various areas of SEO, such as competitor research, keyword planning, and the like. Get started today!