If you have had a website for several years, you have likely accumulated quite a few links pointing to it (so-called backlinks). Some of these may have been created through partnerships, some may have been purchased, and others may have occurred naturally from other websites choosing to link to you. How links were built in the past versus today differs significantly, and outdated link-building practices can actually be harmful to your site today.
The question we aim to answer today is how you can identify and get rid of bad links.
When someone links to your site from a low-quality website, it can negatively affect your PageRank. Google still places significant importance on your link profile. If your site only has links from spammy websites, Google may interpret this as a signal that your site is also spammy and push it down in the search results.
To remove bad backlinks, you need to:
- Review your link profile and identify bad links
- Contact the site owner and ask them to remove the link to your site
- Create a disavow file and submit it to Google
1. Review your link profile and identify bad links
Before you can clean up bad links, you need to find them. This requires examining every corner of your site. Have you ever added hidden links in the footer, for example? This is an old, outdated trick once used to “improve” link profiles and boost rankings. Today, such tactics can cause Googlebot to place your site in a filter such as Penguin, leaving you with significantly more work to do.
A quick way to get an overview is to use tools like Majestic or Ahrefs to analyze your backlinks. Creating an account is free, after which you can choose a pricing tier depending on how much data you want access to.
You can also use Google Search Console to review your backlinks, but it does not provide as comprehensive a list as paid tools.
Finally, there are Chrome add-ons that can display all links on a webpage in your browser. This approach requires more manual work, but it can be useful if you notice that a specific page is underperforming or has dropped significantly in rankings.
Once you have a list of all backlinks—or as many as you can gather—it is time to review them. There are several ways to evaluate backlinks:
- Examine the domain – Domains from other countries may look suspicious in your link profile if your site is entirely in Swedish and does not offer other languages. It is often worth taking a closer look at domains from countries where English is not a common second language. You can see top-level domains (Sweden uses .se, Norway uses .no, etc.) for most countries here. If your site is in Swedish and you find many backlinks from domains ending in .ru (Russia), it is worth investigating them more closely.
- Review anchor texts – Check which anchor texts websites use when linking to your site. Anchor texts in other languages, overly generic anchors, or those containing spam are red flags that warrant further investigation of the linking domain.
- Look at the URL – Sometimes, simply seeing the URL is enough to know that a link is spammy. A URL containing words completely unrelated to your site and commonly associated with spam (such as pharmaceuticals) is very likely a bad backlink.
2. Contact the site owner and ask them to remove the link to your site
Once you have compiled a document containing bad backlinks, you need to find contact information for the relevant domains. Look for contact pages, webmaster email addresses, or similar details. Many spam sites may have contact forms, but these forms often send messages to fake email addresses. Still, it is worth trying to contact the site owner first and asking them to remove the link. If you receive no response, you can assume the email address is fake and proceed to the next step.
3. Create a disavow file and submit it to Google
You can notify Google that you want to disavow a link, meaning that you distance yourself from it. Google interprets a disavow as a signal that you have received a link you cannot remove but do not want to be associated with. You can create a file containing all spammy domains via Google Search Console and upload it for Google to process. There is no official information on how long it takes Google to act on the file, so you simply have to wait and monitor the results. You can read more in detail about this tool at Ahrefs (English).
As a site owner with an interest in SEO, link building is a major part of your work. You are likely careful and choose only the best and most relevant links for your site. However, any website is free to link to you without notifying you, and you may not notice unless you review your link profile from time to time. If you notice that your site is performing worse or suddenly drops several positions in the search results, we strongly recommend immediately reviewing your backlinks as part of your analysis process.
