How to Remove Bad Backlinks

Remove Bad Backlinks

How to Remove Bad Backlinks – Beginner’s Guide Looking to clean up your website’s online presence?

Say goodbye to those pesky bad backlinks with our expert beginner’s guide! Introducing the ultimate solution for digital marketers who want to master the art of removing spam links easily.

Unlock the power to regain control over your website’s rankings on Google with our step-by-step guide, designed specifically for beginners.

No more wasting valuable time sifting through countless online resources or attending monotonous seminars – we’ve got your backlink removal journey covered! With our comprehensive guide, you’ll swiftly learn the ins and outs of identifying and eradicating those harmful backlinks that tarnish your website’s reputation.

Clean up your bad backlinks

Even after creating excellent content, are you still having trouble improving your website’s search rankings? Your website can have negative backlinks stopping it from receiving additional search visitors.

Your website’s rankings may be harmed by unnatural or harmful backlinks.

This beginner’s article is written specifically for you if you’re trying to figure out how to delete undesirable backlinks from your website.

Keeping up a strong backlink profile can actually:

Keeping up a strong backlink profile can actually:

  • improve your site’s overall traffic
  • grow your website’s search rankings
  • boost your site’s organic visibility and so on

Let’s now discuss how to remove bad backlinks from your website in more depth.

Just a quick reminder that Semrush is the BEST tool for identifying and eliminating harmful links from your website. To try it for free, click the following link.

How to Remove Bad Backlinks: The Beginner’s Guide

What Are Bad Backlinks?

Links from spammy or low-quality websites are considered bad backlinks.

These harmful connections may cause more harm than good. Why?

as a result of the possibility that they would inform search engines like Google that your website is also spammy or of low quality. Google penalizes websites with a lot of harmful links in this way.

When a backlink comes from one of the sources listed below, you can classify it as poisonous or bad;

  • Sites that are penalized by Google
  • Adult content sites
  • Illegal content sites
  • High spam blog directories
  • Automatic link generate sites

Links from “unnatural” and “irrelevant” sources that don’t actually provide anything of value to your website are referred to as poisonous or bad backlinks. Toxic backlinks might actually lower the ranks of your website.

Simply told, good backlinks can improve your website’s domain authority (DA), whilst weak ones will lower it. That’s all there is to it.

Here are a few reasons to remove bad links:

  • The organic rankings of your website can be seriously harmed by bad links referring to it.
  • Google may penalize your website if it has bad links.
  • Your site receives a high spam score as a result of bad links.
  • They may actually have an impact on your sales, rankings, and other metrics.

How can you identify bad links on your website then? Now let’s discuss some of the top tools for checking for harmful backlinks.

How to Find & Remove Toxic Backlinks

You may find unwanted or bad backlinks on your website by using one of the several backlink checker programs available.

We suggest Semrush if you’re seeking for a potent SEO tool. Since 2016, we have been utilizing the same method to remove undesirable links from the backlink profile of our website.

In case you were wondering, Semrush is the most popular SEO toolkit, with over 10 million users worldwide.

Additionally, it provides a 14-day free trial that you may use to effortlessly remove harmful links from your website.

Here’s how to remove undesirable backlinks using Semrush.

Go to the Semrush dashboard and log in. Go to the Link Building” section’s “Backlink Audit” tool. Once there, select the button that says “Create project” and looks like this;

Backlink Audit

It will now request that you set up a website backlink assessment. This is how it appears;

Create Project

Semrush will provide you with a comprehensive analysis of your backlink profile once you have set up a backlink audit of your website.

Backlinks Audit

Watch that? It also displays all the harmful domains that are directing traffic to your website.

Here are a few of the harmful domains that have just been found on our website.

Toxic Links

You can see the Toxic Score (TS) and the source URL of the target toxic website in the image above.

You may quickly obtain a list of all the harmful backlinks on your website using this method.

The nicest benefit of using the Semrush Backlink Audit tool is that you can quickly update your disavow file by connecting your Semrush account straight to Google Search Console.

Here’s how to remove links from Semrush.

Disavow

As you can see above, there is a “Actions” button for each link that you can use to quickly shift undesirable backlinks to the Disavow area.

Once you move harmful links to Semrush’s Disavow section, this is how it appears;

Disavow Links

The status of Disavowed links is shown above. Integrating your domain with Google Search Console will help you enhance Disavow links as well.

Ensure that you move all the undesirable links to your Disavow list. Your Disavow links can then be exported using the “Export to TXT” button. When you select the export option, Semrush will create a properly formatted.txt file from your Disavow list.

Disavow Export

In case you’re curious, here’s an overview of how everything happens;

  • The first step is to add harmful backlinks to Semrush’s Disavow tab. You can quickly identify all the harmful backlinks and export them to the disavow list using Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool.
  • Before exporting it to a.txt file, you may choose whether to blacklist a set of URLs or a whole domain.
  • To delete them, upload your file to Google’s disavow tool as the last step. Once they’ve been successfully eliminated, it will now appear as “Disavowed”!

How to Use Google Disavow Links Tool to Remove Bad Links?

Go to the Google Disavow Tool and select the property from which you want to disavow links after you have your.txt file prepared.

Here’s what it looks like;

Disavow Google

To import the.TXT file containing all the hazardous links on your site that you got from Semrush Backlink Audit, use the “Upload disavow list” option.

It’s all over; you’re done.

You may need to wait up to 4 to 6 weeks after posting your website’s disavow file before Google starts considering it.

Important information about utilizing the Google Disavow tool from Google is provided below. It is a sophisticated feature that needs to only be used cautiously.

This feature has the potential to negatively impact how well your website performs in Google’s search results if used improperly.

Only if you think your site has a sizable quantity of spammy, fake, or low-quality links pointing at it do we advise you to disavow backlinks.

What should be considered while using Google Disavow link tool?

It’s because the competition could link to your website using spammy or “bad neighbor” links, which would seriously harm your SERPs or Google search rankings. When Bing first provided this disavow link tool, several users of the search engine said it helped them get rid of spammy links from their websites.

What can Google Disavow Links tool do?

It is the best spam reporting tool provided by Google, allowing you to ask it to ignore a few external links referring to your websites.

This means that you can utilize the Google Disavow link tool to have Google bots remove any spammy external links you believe to be on your website.

This gives you complete control over all of the links leading to your websites.

By utilizing this Google disavow link tool, you not only assist Google get rid of all the poor links pointing to your website, but you also prevent Google from penalizing your website in the future (if it continues to have bad links pointing to it!).

Attention: According to Google’s official blog, the vast majority of websites do not require the usage of this tool in any way. You probably shouldn’t use a tool if you’re unsure of what it does or whether you need to utilize it.

Why? Few bloggers have access to their webmaster tools to retrieve all of their links to the sites in a.CSV or.DOC format. And if they do, Google will remove ALL of your incoming links from your sites from its search results by using the Google disavow tool. How horrible will it be if this really occurs?

Use the Google disavow link tool ONLY if you firmly believe that the links referring to your site are negatively affecting it. And be mindful of the links you are removing from your website; it is best to upload those URLs in a separate file using a program like notepad.

What if, though, you discover a few erroneous links leading to your websites?

The easy solution is to ignore them.

Use the Google disavow tool only if you have used black hat SEO techniques or any other unnatural link building techniques. Or, if you’ve followed Google’s quality requirements to a T and you still feel there are lots of questionable sites referring to yours, use the tool.

How quickly will the bad links be removed if you utilize the Google disavow links tool?

We’re all aware of this. Google uses bots to browse every website’s pages. Therefore, it takes a few days to re-crawl every page on your blog, and if you utilized Google’s tool to disavow poor links, it can take a few days to a few weeks to delete every link you added to it.

It can take up to 6 months typically.

Note: The main benefit of eliminating spammy links from your website is that it will help you combat Penguin updates. In April 2012, Google introduced the Penguin Update to better capture websites that were thought to be abusing its search results, particularly those that were abusing them by purchasing links or utilizing spammy link networks.

What’s the BEST way to deal with bad backlinks?

Here is a brief guide on how to remove harmful links.

Step 1: List all the sources of harmful backlinks for your website.

Finding a list of all the backlinks to your website is the first step. As was already said, you can quickly identify all of the poor links heading to your website by using tools like Semrush Backlink Audit.

Step 2: Contact the blog’s proprietors.

Sending an email to the relevant website owners to request the removal of your links is always a better option than using more sophisticated link removal tools, such as the Google Disavow tool.

Here is an example of an email pitch you might send to website owners to ask them to remove your link from their pages.

Hi [NAME],

My name is [YOUR_NAME] and I’m running the website called [YOUR_WEBSITE]. I wanted to thank you for linking to our website from [URL_OF_THE_PAGE_LINKING_TO_YOU].

Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that it’s best to remove this backlink. Therefore, I will have to ask you kindly to remove this backlink from your site.

The link is located here: [URL_OF_THE_PAGE_LINKING_TO_YOU]

It links to [URL_OF_YOUR_SITE]

And it’s using the anchor text [ANCHOR_TEXT_USED_FOR_YOUR_LINK].

Thank you for your time.

Awaiting your positive reply.

Regards,

[YOUR_NAME]

The most important query is now. How do you even contact blog owners to request the removal of their links to your website?

Here are some fast methods for contacting the bloggers.

  • Using social media to connect (you may search for their entire name)
  • Leaving a comment on a blog post (most websites have blogs and permit comments)
  • Google search for the site’s owner

You can now email the blogger and specify the URL of the link you want to take down. Make an effort to make sure the blogger can quickly locate and remove your link. Send a follow-up email if you have not heard back after 5–10 days.

Step 3: Disavow everything else that you can’t remove

Use the Google Disavow links tool, which is described below, to delete harmful links from your website if you wish to bypass step 2 entirely.

FAQs on how to get rid of bad backlinks

The following are some crucial inquiries you may have regarding deleting spammy links from your website.

To identify the poor connections on your website, you need a program like Semrush Backlink Audit. Then, you can ask the blog owners to delete links by emailing them or by using the Google Disavow tool.

Yes, risky or undesirable backlinks can seriously damage your website. Bad links should be removed as soon as you identify them because they can seriously harm your website’s overall search rankings.

You can get rid of unfavorable backlinks by using one of the many SEO tools available. However, we strongly advise you to use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs. To quickly identify and remove harmful and spammy links from your website, you may also take into account MonitorBacklinks.

To remove backlinks from your website, you must first utilize Google’s Disavow Links Tool. Here are some quick instructions on how to remove links from your website.

Upon arriving at the Disavow links tool, click “Configure my site” and then “Disavow Links.” Use the dropdown menu in the Disavow Links tool to specify whether you are disavowing a page, directory, or domain URL. To disavow a URL, enter it and then select “Disavow.” I’m done now!

First things first: there’s no specific answer to how long it takes Google to disavow bad and spammy links from your site. Usually, it takes about 48 hours for all the Google bots to take notice that there is a new Disavow file for your domain.

That being said, Google bots might still take 4 to 6 months until Google crawls your disavowed links again and remove all the toxic links pointing to your site.

Final Thoughts Regarding the Removal of Bad Backlinks

Backlinks are a crucial component of SEO regardless of the niche you are in.

Finding and eliminating problematic links is always beneficial for your website. You can disavow a backlink using Google’s Search Console if you think it may be harmful.

The Google disavows links tool, however, is a tool that can be useful if you’ve done link building improperly or if your competitors have injured you with too many poor links. It is not a RESET button to erase all the bad connections and to include just the best links on your site.

Hopefully, this in-depth post gave you some tips on how to get rid of undesirable backlinks from Google. If you still have any inquiries, please let us know in the comments section.

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