Removing the Bad Links (Natural)
If you are notified of a possible penalty due to natural links, take the following steps without delay: Remove any 301 and 302 errors, ensure there is no duplicate content and get rid of any 404 errors as well.
Removing the Bad Links (Unnatural)
Backlinks are a leading factor for SEO rankings and cannot be taken lightly. Anything impacting the results i.e. the bad links must be removed with immediate effect. Before you can take action to remove bad links, you have to be able to identify them. The detailed process for that will follow in the next section.
Here are 4 steps to remove bad backlinks for your website:
- For each of the identified links, contact of the website hosting the link.
- Contact the relevant webmaster and request him to remove the said link. Wait for up to 2 weeks to get a response.
- If you fail to get a response, send all the details of the links and your interaction with the concerned webmaster to Google. This should be able to convince them of your sincere efforts to remove the bad backlinks.
Identifying the Bad Backlinks
This is the first step, as mentioned above. For this, you need to decide on a link checker. Export all your backlinks to this link checker and get started with the scrutiny process. Professional SEO services can be very helpful in this respect. To identify the bad ones among your backlinks, look out for the following:
● Links from Blogs or Websites Totally Unrelated to Your Content
These are considered as spam websites and can lead to a penalty from the search engine.
● Links in the Comments Section of a Blog or from a Forum Post
A lot of spam is received through these sources and the search engines do not consider these for indexing.
● Any Link from an Already Penalized Website
These are automatically considered as not acceptable because the website providing the link has already broken the rules in some manner or the other.
● Same Anchor Text Providing Multiple Links
You should be able to identify good anchor texts from the bad ones. The bad ones arise from keyword stuffing and will be used over and over again with exactly the same text.
● Multiple Links from the Footer of the Same Domain
These do not really help in SEO as they are counted as one link, but with stricter measures from Google, these could lead to a penalty.
There are various other ways to locate bad links as one tool may not be able to identify all of them. You can choose to use multiple tools sequentially to identify all of the bad or broken links. Further steps can then be taken to remove bad links leading to your website.
Every website finally wants to rank higher with their SEO efforts and link building is the key to this process. If you keep all the rules and regulations in mind when working on this, the chances of penalty will be less. In case of a penalty, you should be able to work around it and try to get it reversed by taking the necessary steps. In the case you are not able to manage it on your own, take help from a digital marketing agency in Delhi NCR or any branch located closer to you for resolving the issue.