What is toxic or manipulative Backlinks

Definition of toxic backlinks

Toxic backlinks are a term used by some SEO tools to describe backlinks that they believe could harm a website's ranking in Google search results. However, according to Google's John Mueller, there is no such thing as "toxic backlinks" as this is just a term created by some SEO tools.

How to control thousands of backlinks to our website

If we have thousands of backlinks to our website, it is quite certain that we cannot fully control which backlinks may harm the ranking of our website on Google.

We could discover a backlink to our website from a page without content and with thousands of backlinks to a multitude of pages, but this does not have to unnecessarily harm our site. It would be a spam website, but it is not our fault that you want to link to them, unless Google discovers that we have bought that link. In that case, we could suffer an inevitable decrease in the classification or positioning of that linked web page.

What Google understands by manipulative or spam backlinks

Manipulative backlinks are a real thing that Google considers spam. These links are created or purchased solely to improve Google rankings, without taking into account the user experience or the context in which they are placed.

Some of these sites may be private blog networks (PBNs), low-quality directories, or overly optimized anchor texts.

Consequences of having Spam backlinks for Google

Google's guidelines state that any link intended to manipulate ranking in Google search results may be considered link spam.
These types of manipulative links can result in manual action or a penalty from Google if they are discovered.

Not all low-quality or spam backlinks are necessarily manipulative or toxic. Many websites naturally have some spam links, but Google's algorithms can usually ignore them without penalizing the site.

Tools to disavow spam backlinks that harm your site

Google has a tool or options to disavow backlinks that are created that may be spam or may be harming your site.

1. Choose the links to remove.

If your website had good positioning in Google and has recently suffered a notable decline, this may be due to possible links pointing to your website.
Follow the next steps:

• Use the lookkle.com backlink analysis tool.
• Sorts the displayed list of backlinks by date, showing the most recent links first.
• Look at the ranking of each of these links and investigate each page to see if it could be a spam website.
• Use the lookkle spam analysis tool to see if it is a page that does not comply with Google guidelines by having a high spam level.

2. Select the appropriate inbound links.

The backlinks that you must select to disavow must meet the following standards:

• Fraudulent and artificial links.
  They are those links obtained through prior agreement with the website that links you or links that have been obtained through purchase, that is, by giving an amount of money to the website of origin to place a link from your page within theirs.
• Low quality links.
  These are the links that are located in:
  •  Link farms with more than 20 external links on the same page.
  •  Pages without content where there are only external links without text.
  •  Pages whose content has no relationship with the content of your linked page.
  •  Dummy Anchor Text. Anchor text that links to your page that is related to the content of the publishing page, but has no relationship with the content of your linked page.
• Latest backlinks ordered by most recent date that may have caused a manual action by Google towards your site, significantly damaging your ranking within the search engine.

3. Create a list of links to disavow.

In the following Google link, you can obtain more exhaustive information on how to create this list of links and the file in which you have to upload the list of links to disavow:

• Create a text file with a .txt extension.
• Within the file include one URL or domain per line.
• If you want to disavow a domain or subdomain, that is, all links pointing from that domain to your site, add the prefix “domain:” followed by the domain name.
  For example: domain:example.com.
• The created file must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII. It is advisable to create it with a basic text editor, such as Windows Notepad.
• The created file cannot have more than 100,000 lines or occupy more than 2 MB.
• Comments can be included in the file using the # sign before the comment to be written.

Text file example:

# Pages that should be disavowed
http://spam.example.com/coomments.html
http://spam.example.com/paid-links.html

# A domain that should be disavowed
domain:spam-domain.com

4. Access the Google Search Console

Sign in to your Google Search Console account: https://search.google.com/search-console/

5. Access the Google backlink disavow page

• Select the property for your domain where you want to remove backlinks.
• Upload the text file created in which you have the list of backlinks that you want to eliminate.
• If the uploaded file has any errors, Google will show it immediately. You must correct the list and upload it again. It must be the same listing, not a new listing.
• If the file is uploaded correctly, it may take up to several weeks for Google to process the result.

Create quality content to avoid being banned by search engines

If you don't want any of your pages to be banned by Google, start by creating high-quality content. If Google considers that this content is essential for its search engine, be clear that no matter how many spam links are directed to your site, your page will occupy the main positions within the search engine.