What Is Backlink & Why Is It Important?
Backlink is influential to SEO in both positive and negative ways. A backlink refers to the situation when one site mentions your company and links to your site, a backlink is created. For example, a blog page gave a review about your company and gave some comments on your product and included a link to your online catalogue, a backlink is created where blog readers can enter your website via the link provided.
Backlink is important to your website since it is a way for Google to review your website and determine the validity and value of your content. The more backlinks you obtain, the more likely your site to appear in the search result. Usually, most backlinks are positive and could increase your site ranking. Yet, some are not and they are called toxic backlinks. These toxic backlinks could harm your site and result in potentially serious consequences.
Impacts Of Toxic Links Towards SEO
In the eyes of ordinary people or potential customers, a negative impression could be formed when they see toxic backlinks on your website. If those toxic backlinks refer your website to some other malicious or inappropriate websites, your company image could be seriously damaged and your word-of-mouth would be negative as well.
According to consultant Bob Carver, Google has introduced the Penguin algorithm in 2012 and one of its main functions was to diagnose and penalise sites with toxic backlinks. Once you get penalised, your website ranking will decrease eventually and such that your website will be less likely to appear in the search result. In a more extreme case, your site could even be removed from the search index, it is like a death penalty issued to you by Google. Based on this, all your effort put in optimising your website would be sabotaged and you will have to give in even more hard work to rescind the penalties and other negative impacts.
Ways To Tackle Toxic Links
There are several ways to tackle toxic links and you can start with analysing your website.
To start with, you can make use of some SEO tools like SEMRush that can help audit your website to see if they diagnose any backlink issues, especially toxic backlinks. Google Search Console can also help with checking problematic backlinks, but only apply to manual penalties issued by Google.
Moving on, you have to start to handle the toxic links. One of the options is to contact the administrator of that particular website to see if they can remove the links to your site. On the other hand, you can also request a review of those toxic links from Google. By making such a request, Google will take note and review your backlinks to see if they will overturn their decision. As a last resort, you can choose to disavow the backlinks at Google if they seem less important. By this, Google would not contemplate the relationship between you and that particular website and thus not considering this backlink when it ranks your website.
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