Link building is a very important part of SEO. When a user types a query in Google, the search engine decides which websites are to be shown on the first pages of SERPs, and in which position. And, this is based on various factors, one of the most important ones being the number and quality of incoming links to a page. And, as much as these backlinks are important, bad backlinks are equally harmful for SEO. Google penalizes bad backlinks as low-quality link-building is a violation of Google Webmaster guidelines.
How does Google penalize bad backlinks?
Google can recognize and differentiate artificially built backlinks from natural ones. Artificially built backlinks are links that are brought to the site only for increasing the page rank of a website; these are not relevant or useful links. These could include links that are bought, exchanged, or brought in through guest posting with keyword-rich anchor text links. To protect search quality, and avoid building of such bad backlinks, Google came up with the Penguin update in 2012, wherein websites with low quality backlinks are removed or devalued. Earlier, Google ran this Penguin algorithm once in a few months, but now it has been integrated as a part of the core ranking algorithm. With such strict checks, it is important to remove any such bad backlinks from your site so as to avoid any penalties and losing of rank.
How to remove bad backlinks?
Let us learn how to identify bad backlinks and remove them from your site. But, before that, you need to know that there are two types of links – Follow and No-Follow links. When Google checks the links pointing to a particular website, it checks whether the links have a “nofollow” tag. Links with such a tag are not taken into account by Google for ranking. This means that the No-Follow links do no harm to your website. So, while removing bad backlinks, you have to focus only on the Follow links.
The first step is to identify the bad backlinks so that you can remove them. You can use any of the two methods for doing so – manual or with the help of a tool. For the manual process, you will have to export the backlinks in an Excel spreadsheet and manually review each link to identify the bad ones, which will then be submitted to Google. Conversely, you can use the SEMRush tool to automatically check the backlinks and identify the bad ones for disownment. Once you have identified the bad backlinks, you can submit a request to Google to remove them. This will instruct the search engine not to take into account these links, and hence you will be saved from penalty.
Remember that when you follow the Google Webmasters guidelines and work towards creating a website that provides value to the users, you will never have to worry about any kinds of penalties. This is where a company that offers the most professional and expert SEO services in Bangalore can help by taking care of every optimization element of a website.
