Bad Backlinks

Bad backlinks are links that come from unrelated and/or untrusted sources. Sites that have been penalized and those that are violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines can have a negative impact on your search engine optimisation and rankings.

To avoid having bad backlinks, you have to perform a quick website audit to all the sites you plan to build links on and the number one rule – DON’T BUY BAD BACKLINKS! You might get some short term gains but you’ll run the risk of a Google penalty.

Good Backlinks

A backlink is a hyperlink that links from a webpage to another webpage or website. In search engines optimisation,  high-quality backlinks can help improve your rankings. It’s important that backlinks are relevant to the website and its content, so as not to negatively impact a site’s search engine ranking.

Types of Bad Backlinks

Links from websites which are solely developed to provide SEO links

These sites often have a ton of articles that lack all coherence. If this is the case chances are the website is set up solely for the purpose of linking other websites and will not be a good backlink.

Links from comments of other websites

Comments from reputable sites are great but comments from sites that aren’t can negatively affect your SEO. Don’t get fooled. Comment spam links are bad for your backlink profile, so you need to check out the site.

Links with over optimised anchor texts

In general, most backlinks to a website are linked using the website name as the anchor text (link text). The URL itself is also often used. If your website has a huge number of websites linking to your website using exact keywords, that looks very suspicious.

Links within duplicate texts

Usually, websites that are just set up for the links have content that just doesn’t make sense, or is scraped from related websites. Some black hat companies create sites per subject, to make it look like the links are on related, quality websites.  Duplicate content is a sign of low quality in most cases.

Links from Russia, while your audience is local

As the websites linking to you are likely to be related to your business, you’ll understand that a link from a Russian website for your local consultancy company site in Auckland doesn’t look natural at all.

To read the full article, and to get tips on to find find and clean your bad backlinks visit the Yoast article.

If you would like a site audit or need help cleaning up your backlinks then please contact us.