To remove toxic backlinks from your website, follow these steps to protect your SEO and avoid penalties from search engines like Google:
How to remove toxic backlinks from your website?
Toxic backlinks are harmful and can negatively affect a website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). There are a few ways to remove toxic backlinks: You can take them down by hand from your website, use tools like Google’s Disavow tool, or contact the site owner and ask them to remove the link. If you suspect you have toxic backlinks on your website, it is time to remove them.
Step 1: Identify Toxic Backlinks
Use SEO tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz to audit your backlink profile. Search for links coming from spammy, irrelevant, or poor quality websites, and those with unnatural anchor text.
Step 2: Submit links to Webmasters for Removal
Engage Webmasters for Removal. Contact and inform the owners/webmasters of the sites where your toxic backlinks are located. Respectfully ask them to remove the links. Tools like SpyFu or SEMrush can help you find contact information useful for reaching out.
Step 3: Disavow Tool
Use Google’s Disavow Tool. If webmasters do not respond or refuse to remove them, use Google’s Disavow Tool. A list of URLs and/or domains to disavow is stored in a .txt file. Each entry is formatted as “domain:example.com” for entire domains or “example.com/page” for specific pages. Upload the file into Google Search Console under the Disavow Links section.
Step 4: Monitor and Maintain
Keep Watch and Maintain. Check your backlink profile for new toxic links regularly. Use tools such as Link Detox or WebCEO to automate identification and removal. You’ll be required to submit reconsideration requests in Google Search Console if you have received a manual penalty.
Additional Tips:
- To avoid disavowing good links, only target clearly harmful ones. Ensure that you record your outreach efforts for future reference.
- If you need to remove links on a large scale, utilize professional services for removal if necessary.
- Eliminating toxic backlinks is a critical task to ensure that your link profile remains healthy and to preserve your site’s SEO performance.
Steps to Remove Toxic Backlinks:
- SEO tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console identify toxic backlinks. Check if links are from spammy, low-quality, or irrelevant websites.
- Contact the webmasters of the sites hosting the toxic links and politely ask for removal. Keep records of your requests for future reference. If removal is not feasible, create a disavow file in plain text (.txt) format listing the URLs or domains you want Google to ignore.
- Each entry should be on a separate line, using the format “domain:example.com” to disavow all links from a domain. Upload the disavow file to Google Search Console’s Disavow Links Tool.
- It may take several weeks for Google to process the file and update your rankings.
Important Notes to remove toxic backlinks :
- Before disavowing, always try manual removal, as Google prefers this approach.
- Regularly audit your backlink profile to catch new toxic links early.
- Keep detailed records of all removal attempts and disavowals for documentation.
- This process helps protect your website from penalties and maintains a healthy backlink profile for SEO.
Recommended Tools to remove toxic backlinks :
- Google Disavow Links Tool: For submitting your disavow file.
- Semrush, Ahrefs, or WebCEO: For identifying and analyzing toxic backlinks.
- Remove’em, Linkquidator, rmoov: For automated outreach and link removal requests.
Once you get rid of remove toxic backlinks, always start out in the manual outreach part first, only using Google’s Disavow Tool for the links that cannot be taken down. After your backlinks are taken down, go through them for documentation and check your backlink profile frequently in order to identify new toxic links before they creep in. This kind of strategy can protect your website from penalties and is beneficial to the long-term SEO health.
