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Backlinks are known as the links that direct users to your website or webpage from numerous sources. These sources can include blog posts, another webpage, etc. Backlinks play a vital role in increasing the traffic on your website. However, backlinks also provide you the opportunity to attract a specific audience that has no specific interest in your content or your website.

In a nutshell, backlinks are crucial to increase the visibility and ranking of your website. However, all backlinks are not the same, and some can hurt your website by lowering your website ranking.

Today we will discuss how you can identify and remove bad backlinks. We will also talk about how bad backlinks hurt your website.

How to identify bad backlinks

Some of the ways you can identify potentially toxic backlinks are specified below.

• Use a reliable backlink checker

  One of the most authentic and convenient ways how you can identify toxic backlinks is using a reliable backlink checker. For example, you can use Google Backlinks Checker or Ahrefs backlink checker to find and identify the bad backlinks.

  All you need to do is copy and paste your website´s web address into a backlink checker, and voila, your work is done. A reliable backlink checker will tell you the origin of the bad backlinks and also tell you wether they are toxic or not.

  Moreover, using a reliable backlink checker will also tell you the additional features about the backlinks, such as spam score and authority. For example, a higher spam score means a backlink is toxic. And it is capable of hurting your website.

  Through analyzing a backlink’s authority, you can identify both outbound and internal links. Moreover, through this, you can see the domain score of the websites having your backlinks.

• Manually check for the relevancy of your backlinks

  Another way to check backlinks and verify whether they are good or bad is to manually check their relevance. Relevant backlinks are more clicked by users, and thus, they are vital in attracting your target audience.

  Suppose your website has backlinks from web pages that have an irrelevant domain respective to your website. In that case, that backlink is considered a harmful or toxic backlink.

• Check the quality of your backlinks through Google Search Console

  You can also check the quality of your backlinks through Google Search Console. To do this, go to Links, and then to the heading of External Link. Under the external link section, you can see the overall number of backlinks (unique).

  You can learn more about backlinks via Google Search Console. For example, you can learn about the websites having the most significant number of backlinks to your business website. You can also learn about the external links, the relation between backlinks, and unnatural anchor text.

How to remove a toxic backlink?

Some of the ways you can remove a toxic backlink are listed below.

Contact the specific website

As mentioned earlier, you can identify the websites having a greater number of bad backlinks to your website. Make sure to contact that specific website. Talk to the website owner and ask him to remove the backlink that is hurting your website.

Make sure that you tell them about the relevancy factor, as most of the toxic backlinks result from irrelevancy. Make sure to ask politely the developers of the website having a bad backlink to convince them.

Use the disavow link tool

Disavow means to deny the responsibility of something. Before you disavow your backlinks, make sure to create a proper list consisting of which links you want to disavow. Disavowing a bad backlink helps maintain your ranking and prevents your website from getting degraded.

Frequently check your backlinks

Frequently checking backlinks will help you identify toxic backlinks and allow you to take action before they potentially hurt your website.

How do bad backlinks hurt your website?

Bad or toxic backlinks hurt your business website in a couple of ways. First, Google places web pages having relevant backlinks on top. Hence, if you have backlinks from pages having irrelevant content to your website, you would not target your audience. The reason is that your content would simply not reach your target audience.

In addition to this, having bad backlinks that attract your audience can also degrade your website’s ranking, as toxic backlinks reduce your visibility.

Conclusion

The above-specified are some of the ways through you can check bad backlinks generated by numerous websites and web pages. In addition, some of the methods through which you can fix or remove bad backlinks are also stated above. In addition to this, the negative impact that toxic backlinks have on your website is also listed above.