Bad backlinks can hurt your rankings on Google’s and other search engine results pages (SERPs). An important process of website maintenance is conducting regular audits of your site to find and identify which sites are linking to your web pages and reviewing those to determine if they are bad backlinks you need to eliminate.

There are several different tools to help run reports to find backlinks, including Google’s Webmaster Tools. Once you have ran your reports, you can start to audit each of the backlinks. The first thing you will want to do is look at the website where the link resides and consider the following:

1. Is the web page related to or relevant for your industry? If so, then you want to keep it, as it is considered a quality backlink. If not, then you will want to mark it so you can get rid of it.
2. Is the web page from a foreign country? Links from certain foreign country web pages could hurt your rankings, so you may want to get rid of them.
3. Does the backlink on the other site point to a nonexistent or low-quality page on your site? If so, you should mark the backlink and determine the most appropriate solution to use.

After reviewing all of the backlinks on your report, you will probably have a list of ones you either need to remove or address using another solution.

Removing Bad Backlinks

You need to carefully use the right solutions to remove bad backlinks so you do not hurt your current Google rankings. Four possible options are:

1. Contact the website owner and request that they remove the link. This is an acceptable option when you only have a small amount of bad backlinks to clean up. Unfortunately, not all website owners will respond, and some of those that do may demand a payment to remove the link. Fortunately, you have other options, so you do not ever have to make a payment to get rid of a bad backlink.
2. Submit a request to Google to have the backlinks disavowed. In cases where ransom demands are being made to remove the link or you are not getting a response, you can disallow bad backlinks. It does not mean the backlinks will go away, just that Google will no longer take these into account when ranking your site.
3. If there are just too many backlinks to cleanup, you may want to get a new domain and launch a new website. Sometimes it is better to just start over and rebuild your rankings. This option is also recommended if your site has received penalties from Google as a result of some of their more recent updates.
4. Create new web pages for backlinks pointing to pages that do not exist or improve the quality of content on pages with low-quality content. This one is probably one of the easiest to address and resolve, as long as the backlink is from a relevant or related website. If not, then you should request the website owner remove the link or disavow it.

For assistance with backlink audits and removing bad backlinks from your website, contact the SEO experts at Logik Digital by phoning 1-866-307-0086 today!