Sabotaging SEO: What Kinds of Backlinks Should You Avoid?
Let’s imagine the SEO landscape as a bustling party where backlinks are the famous guests everyone wants to mingle with. They have the power to boost your site’s reputation, making it the life of the party in search engine’s eyes.
However, only some backlinks are your friend. Some can lead you down the path of Google penalties, while others can leave a sour taste in your site’s reputation. Just like you wouldn’t invite troublemakers to your shindig, you should steer clear of specific backlinks in your SEO strategy.
Whether you’re a seasoned SEO veteran or a newbie still finding your footing, this blog post is your friendly guide to identifying and avoiding the bad apples in the world of backlinks. We will explore the types of backlinks that can sabotage your SEO efforts and give you tips on tackling them before they crash your party.
Just when you thought it was all about accumulating as many backlinks as possible, we’re here to throw a curveball. Your website must avoid specific backlinks like the plague because you wouldn’t want to be associated with a dubious character. It’s about more than just the quantity of backlinks, folks, and the quality.
We Know Spammy Backlinks Are Bad, But How Bad Are We Talking?
One of the most harmful types of backlinks to your website’s SEO efforts is spammy and low-quality backlinks. These links come from irrelevant or low-quality sites, often created solely to manipulate search engine rankings.
Now, before we dig deeper and discuss the bad apples of backlinks, let’s look at some effects of bad backlinks on your website:
- Lower Search Rankings: Spammy and low-quality backlinks often lead to lower search rankings, as most search engines, especially Google, penalize sites that use such tactics.
- Loss of Credibility: When a website links to low-quality or irrelevant sites, it can lose credibility and authority. This can result in a customer loss who may no longer trust the area due to its associations.
- Traffic Drop: Low-quality backlinks can significantly drop organic traffic as they provide little substantial value to the visitors.
- Penalization from Search Engines: Search engines have advanced algorithms and manual reviewers who can find and penalize sites for using spammy or low-quality backlinks.
- Decreased User Experience: User experience is crucial for any website. However, spammy links divert users to irrelevant or unwanted pages, leading to a poor user experience.
- Higher Bounce Rate: If the backlinks bring in irrelevant traffic, this can increase your bounce rate, as visitors will immediately leave your site if they don’t find what they are looking for.
- Negative SEO Impact: Low-quality backlinks can negatively affect your site’s SEO. It can make your site seem less reliable and lower its domain authority.
- Difficult Recovery: Once a site has been penalized by Google for using spammy backlinks, it can be a long and arduous process to get the site back in Google’s good graces.
- Damage to Online Reputation: If a company gets known for using low-quality or spammy backlinks, it can damage their reputation not just with search engines, but also with their customers or clients which could affect their business operations in the long run.
Once you understand how to tell the wrong links from the good, regularly monitor your website’s backlink profile to identify and remove any harmful links that may negatively impact your site’s reputation and search engine ranking.
Spammy and Low-Quality Backlinks – 10 Most Common Types
| Type of Back Link | Description | Recommended Approach |
| Paid Links and Link Exchanges | Purchased or traded links | Acquire high-quality backlinks organically |
| Irrelevant and Unnatural Anchors | Unrelated or forced anchor text | Ensure relevant, non-manipulative anchor text |
| Over-optimized and Manipulative Anchor Texts | Keyword manipulation | Use balanced, truthful anchor text for trust |
| Private Blog Networks (PBNs) | Manipulative networks | Obtain high-quality links naturally; audit and disavow PBN links |
| Footer and Sidebar Backlinks | Links in website sections | Prioritize high-quality in-content backlinks |
| Links from Irrelevant and Non-Authentic Websites | Irrelevant links | Focus on links from relevant, trusted sites |
| Unnatural Link Velocity | Rapid link acquisition | Build high-quality links gradually; avoid spammy practices |
| Anchor Text Diversity | Varied anchor text phrases | Diversify naturally; avoid keyword stuffing |
| No-Follow Links | Unfollowed links | Seek both do-follow and no-follow links for diversity |
| Toxic Links | Harmful, untrustworthy links | Regularly monitor and remove toxic links; prioritize quality |
Below are the detailed description of each of these types of bad backlinks along with the tips to get rid of them.
1. Paid Links and Link Exchanges:
Paid links are links that you buy to increase your website’s visibility. Link exchanges work by trading links with other websites for the primary purpose of boosting backlinks.
Recommended Approach:
Instead of using paid links and link exchanges, focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks through organic means.
This includes creating valuable content, building relationships with industry-related websites, and legitimate guest blogging opportunities.
2. Irrelevant and Unnatural Anchors:
Definition: Irrelevant and unnatural anchors refer to the anchor text used in links that lack relevance to the linked content or appear forced or over-optimized.
Using “click here” as the anchor for a link to a services page instead of using more descriptive anchor text like “learn more about our services.”
Recommended Approach:
Ensure your anchor text has relevancy to the linked content and provides useful context for users.
Avoid unnatural and over-optimized anchor texts, which can appear manipulative to search engines.
3. Over-optimized and Manipulative Anchor Texts:
Over-optimized anchor texts involve excessively using keywords or phrases to manipulate search engine rankings. Manipulative anchor texts deceive users or search engines about the linked webpage’s content.
For example, repeatedly using the exact keyword phrase in anchor text for various links makes it clear that the primary purpose is to manipulate search engine rankings.
Recommended Approach:
Maintain a natural and balanced approach to your anchor texts. They should offer meaningful context about the linked content without appearing spammy or manipulative.
Use truthful and accurate anchor texts reflecting the linked content, building trust with users and search engines.
4. Private Blog Networks (PBNs):
Private Blog Networks are collections of websites usually owned by one person or corporation, created to build backlinks to a specific site to manipulate search engine rankings. These networks often consist of low-quality and irrelevant content, making them easy to spot by search engines.
A company that sells kitchen appliances decides to create 10 different blog websites, all with various articles about “best kitchen appliances.” All the blog posts contain backlinks leading to the main company’s website.
Recommended Approach:
Instead of using PBNs, focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks organically from authoritative and relevant websites.
This practice might take longer but will ensure your website’s solid and trustworthy online presence. Keep a regular check on your backlink profile and disavow any toxic links, including those from PBNs.
5. Footer and Sidebar Backlinks:
Footer and sidebar backlinks are links placed strategically in a website’s footer or sidebar sections to increase the number of backlinks on a webpage.
An e-commerce website includes links to its various product pages in the website’s footer or sidebar, which are displayed across every page on the site.
Recommended Approach:
Instead of populating footers and sidebars with excessive links, focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks within the main content of web pages.
These types of links are deemed more valuable by search engines and will thus have a more significant impact on your SEO efforts.
6. Links from Irrelevant and Non-Authentic Websites:
These are backlinks obtained from websites irrelevant to your website’s content or not genuine.
A fitness website acquires a backlink from a site dedicated to gardening tips. Both sites do not correlate, making the link irrelevant.
Recommended Approach:
Acquire backlinks from trustworthy, relevant, and authoritative websites that align closely with your website’s content.
These links will add value to your site, boost its credibility, and enhance your SEO performance.
7. Unnatural Link Velocity:
Unnatural link velocity refers to the rate at which a website gains backlinks. When this rate accelerates too quickly and unnaturally, it is usually due to manipulative SEO practices and can signify to search engines that the website might be low-quality.
An example of unnatural link velocity could be a new website that suddenly acquires a significant amount of backlinks in a short period.
While a site might naturally acquire a large number of links due to a viral content piece, most of the time, unnatural link velocity is associated with spammy or poor-quality sites.
Recommended Approach:
Focus on building high-quality backlinks over time, maintaining a more natural growth rate. Avoid engagement with link farms or any other black-hat SEO practices.
Continue to monitor and manage your link profile, removing low-quality or spammy links regularly.
8. Anchor Text Diversity:
Anchor text diversity refers to using a variety of different phrases as clickable text in hyperlinks (anchor text). A good mix of branded, non-branded, keyword-based, and generic anchor texts helps the website appear more natural and less manipulative to search engines.
Instead of using the same keyword or phrase for all your anchor texts, you should diversify. This could include using different versions of your target keywords, brand names, call-to-action phrases, or even more generic terms like “click here” or “learn more”.
Recommended Approach:
Aim to diversify your anchor texts in a natural and valuable way, avoiding over-optimization.
Avoid stuffing keywords into your anchor texts, as search engines view this as spammy. Use contextually relevant texts that provide a clear indication of the linked content.
9. No-Follow Links:
These ones tell search engines not to follow or consider them while ranking web pages.
These links are embedded with the rel=”nofollow” attribute and are usually used in comments, sponsored posts, or untrustworthy content.
A typical example of a no-follow link might be a link you include in a guest post on another website.
The website owner might allow the link but apply a no-follow attribute, telling search engines not to consider this link when ranking the websites.
Recommended Approach:
While no-follow links don’t contribute directly to SEO, they can indirectly help drive traffic to your site. This can help broaden your audience.
Diversify your link-building approach by seeking both do-follow and no-follow links.
10. Toxic Links:
Toxic links are links from untrustworthy or spammy websites. These can harm your website’s reputation and negatively impact your search engine ranking.
They typically come from sites penalized by Google, with low domain authority, or areas involved in shady SEO practices.
A toxic link might come from a website that offers paid links, a site that has been penalized by Google for abuse or unethical practices, or a website that is purely full of spam content.
Recommended Approach:
Routinely monitor and audit your backlinks using various SEO tools. Identify and remove or disavow any toxic links to your website.
Have a proactive approach and aim to build high-quality, reliable links rather than focusing on generating a high quantity of links.
Parting Words:
To ensure better SEO outcomes, prioritize high-quality, relevant, organic backlinks that enhance your website’s authority and trustworthiness.
Remember, wrong links can sabotage your site’s visibility and reputation, so it’s essential to avoid them.