It’s easy to think that auto-republishing tools and bots do a great job at creating links that backlink to your profile. In reality, these tools work on low-quality and low-ranking blogs and articles. This eventually downgrades your reputation on Google.
When you think of SEO and backlinking, you would ideally want reputable websites to point back at your website. This would build good SEO for your site and increase your chances of ranking higher on Google. But if low-quality sites or blogs publish your website, the bad “link juice,” would make your site seem inferior. As a result, Google will also not consider your website as good quality and will push you down its list.
Does that mean you don’t have any option but to stick with the low-quality articles and blogs? No, you have an excellent option of cleaning your backlink profile, and that’s what link detoxing is all about. Of course, it’s not always possible to clean up each and every link, you can, however, freshen most of the links and revamp your backlink profile. Let’s take a look at how this system works.
DIY Link Detox
It’s not difficult to detox your backlinks. The first thing you should do is analyze the links. You can use the MOZ Open Site Explorer, a free tool to check your backlink profile. Enter your website to find out the links connecting to your site’s root domain and subdomain. Additionally, you can also organize the links according to do-follow, no-follow, link equity, or other filters.
Apart from MOZ Open Site Explorer, you can also use MonitorBacklinks.com to get access to your backlink profile.
Following are the steps that you need to remember while removing the unwanted links that backlink to your website:
Use keyword-rich anchor texts
Always use a backlink auditing tool to find anchor texts related to each backlink. SEMrush is a useful tool that categorizes anchors according to different names, such as money, branded, organic, and compound. Suppose your anchor text “money,” wants to backlink to your solicitor or law firm company. Google would consider this as an attempt to manipulate the link, and as a result, mark you down.
It’s also risky to allow compound anchor texts to backlink to your website. These texts usually contain your brand’s name and a phrase or keyword that denotes your business type. For example, ABC Law Firm. Google also looks down on these backlinks and would consider them manipulative.
Deleting too many links may also not work in your favor as it would reduce your website’s credibility. Therefore, you should contact the webmaster for the respective backlink source and tell him to edit the anchor text that links to your brand name. It should be used naturally and not forcefully. That will allow Google to give full value to your link and not mark it down.
Remove links from potentially toxic sites
It is easy to figure out the toxicity of referring domains using backlink auditing tools. You can accordingly delete the links from sites that provide bad value to your website.
For example, SEMrush analyzes the links based on 30 toxic factors, such as complementary, spam in communities, harmful environment, manipulative links, link networks, irrelevant sources, and many more. Once it goes through the links, it will provide respective toxic scores out of 100. This will indicate whether the sites are good for your website or not. Anything over the score of 45 is not a good link and should immediately go to your backlink detox list.
Toxic metric system
Most toxic sites usually have a low domain authority and high external link density. In reality, it should just be the opposite, and that’s why your website should stay away from them. It’s like protecting your kid from mixing with the bad guys in the neighborhood. You wouldn’t want them to have any influence on your child.
It’s wise to 404 those pages if you try to stay away from those toxic sites. Suppose you want to remove the page altogether. Make sure that the page returns to a 404 or 410 HTTP response code. According to John Mueller from Google, the search engine will automatically ignore those links.
There is a difference between doing a 404 or 410 to the respective pages and not taking responsibility for them at all. Google prefers website owners to at least 404 the pages linked from toxic sites instead of ignoring them completely.
What’s next?
Once you clear all the garbage away, your backlink profile is not ready to explore new options. This time, you should focus only on high-quality links that point back to your website, thus improving your website’s chances of ranking higher on Google. Here are a few things that you can do:
Always get expert quotes before trusting a website. High-quality websites usually have a higher quote. You can check HARO to get those quotes. Even bloggers and journalists who work for sites like Forbes, MSN, and many other well-known brands use HARO to get quotes for their blogs and articles. Using the links that you receive from this tool will make your backlink profile better.
You should also not miss an opportunity to cross-promote your website. Find high-quality websites and blogs that are ready to cross-promote on your site and you can request them to use a phrase or keyword that naturally backlinks to your website. Additionally, you can also contact local newspapers if your company has an upcoming event. The e-version of the newspaper may mention your website, thus creating a high-quality backlink.
You should also come up with an interactive tool, guide, or infographics of your website and share it with influencers in your industry who want to work with you. Additionally, you can also reach out to high-ranking website owners and bloggers and request them to publish your data as their resource so that the link points back to your website.
Sometimes, you may forget to add your website link to your company profiles. Add them if they are missing. You may find backlink detoxing a boring job, but once you clear the toxic links, you can follow these habits to build a positive SEO for your website. It’s always wise to audit your backlink profile at least once in three months if you want to stay in Google’s good books.
Email marketing campaigns still work. You can work with a digital marketing team if you don’t know how to write a compact and compelling email for your target audience.
Once you finish detoxing, it’s time to start afresh. Consider this as starting a healthy diet to stay fit. You would want to work with as many reputable websites and blogs as possible to build a robust backlink profile. This would also make your investment in SEO worthwhile. It’s important to know how you can build high-quality backlinks. That way, you will end up spending less time on your backlink profile and focus on positive SEO link building and link earning via local media and social media that provides better results for your site.
It’s not that you won’t come across random links or spammy links that link back to your website. Barring those, it’s your responsibility to build a fresh backlink profile. You can start detoxing today if you feel that your backlink profile is not up to the mark.
According to Google, the quality of your backlink is more important than quantity. Therefore, if you want Google to consider your site as a reputable one, make sure you get rid of the toxic websites that link to your site and make it look like one of them.