What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “spam backlinks”? You’re right if you think about harmful links weighing down your site’s SEO. Spam backlinks are among the most common causes of lost rankings, reduced traffic, and even Google penalties.

In this guide, we’ll dive into what spam backlinks are, how they hurt your website, and—most importantly—how to identify and remove them to keep your SEO intact.

What Are Spam Backlinks?

Backlinks play a crucial role in boosting your website’s credibility, with pages ranked #1 on Google having an average of 3.8x more backlinks than others. Not all backlinks are beneficial, spam backlinks, in particular, can do more harm than good. 

These toxic links often come from low-authority sites, link farms, or irrelevant sources without connection to your business or industry. They are typically created with the manipulative goal of artificially boosting rankings in search engines. 

Instead of improving your SEO, these spammy backlinks can damage your site’s credibility, visibility, and rankings. If search engines detect too many harmful links, your site could face penalties, such as a drop in rankings or even de-indexing. Identifying and removing spam backlinks is essential to maintain your site’s SEO health.

Negative Impacts of Spam Backlinks

Every new backlink might be a step toward improving your search rankings. After all, the more backlinks, the better, correct? Not really. While backlinks are one of the most important things in SEO, not all help you. Some backlinks will hurt your SEO rather than help it.

Trash backlinks are links from low-quality or irrelevant sites that can badly affect your website’s reputation. These links are usually built with the intention of hoodwinking search rankings.

Google views these links as attempts to manipulate search rankings, which can result in penalties. If too many spammy backlinks point to your site, Google may take action and lower your rankings.

These usually come from questionable sources, such as link farms or comment spam-low-quality content networks. For example, if you notice that backlinks from certain .cn or .ru domains are growing fast and do not make sense within your niche-so may be your backlink profile.

 While having a few spammy links might not seem like a big deal, an overwhelming number of them can make it appear that you’re engaging in shady SEO practices, which could lead to Google’s Penguin algorithm taking action against your website.

  • Important:
This means not all backlinks are good, and further in-text spam backlinks from low-quality or irrelevant sites can harm your SEO and result in Google penalties. Some toxic links, like ranking drops, can trigger negative actions from Google’s algorithms. Regularly monitoring the backlink profile is very important for protecting the site’s reputation and keeping it at a high level of SEO performance.

How to Identify Spam Backlinks?

Finding spam backlinks can be a real chore, but it’s way easier with some proper tools to help. The best way to discover toxic links is by doing a manual review. That requires more time, but thanks to SEO tools, which support audits of your website backlink profile, for example, Ahrefs, and SEMrush,…. you can easily point to such links.

If you think these tools are only for advanced users, think again. They are user-friendly and essential for anyone serious about website health.

Ahrefs 

To identify spam backlinks using Ahrefs, follow these simple steps:

  1. Login to the Ahrefs tool and proceed to the Site Explorer tool. 
  2. In the search bar, insert the URL of your website.
  3. Click “Search” to open your website profile. 
  4. In the “Inbound Links” section on the side menu, click the “Backlinks” report to see the backlinks that link to your site. Next, filter out the low-quality links: check backlinks from sites with low DR or irrelevant topics. 
  5. Pay close attention to the anchor text: over-optimization or anchor texts with unrelated keywords raise a red flag for spammy backlinks. 
  6. To ease the work, Ahrefs offers a spam score feature where suspicious links are highlighted for you.
  7. After identifying the spammy backlinks, you can export the data for further analysis or take that information to disavow those bad links via Google’s Disavow Tool, protecting your site from any penalty.

Source: Ahrefs

SEMrush 

You can also use SEMrush to identify these spam backlinks:

  1. Log into your SEMrush account, open the Backlink Audit Tool
  2. Set the settings to audit your website’s backlinks in-depth. 
  3. It then marks every single backlink with what it calls a Toxic Score as the auditing finishes and provides an explicit sense of links that could threaten your website or part of the spam chain in backlinks.
  4. Check if any come from low- or no-value domains, which could signal a spam link.
  5. Then, review the anchor text since unnatural or over-optimized anchor text is considered one of the factors indicating toxic backlinks. This would bring into your view factors to consider in order to find and remove spam backlinks from your website.

Source: SEmrush

Handle Spam Backlinks

Remove Spam Backlinks

Spam backlinks’ handling and removal are indispensable to good SEO profile maintenance. 

Contact the webmasters of sites with toxic links and ask to remove backlinks to your site; this step can be beneficial if one can’t disavow the links.

Use automation, where necessary, with tools like SEMrush to automate processes associated with sending removal requests quickly and on time.

  • Further, accurately record everything done. Document the outreach communications you do, plus all removal requests. This provides clear evidence of all proactive steps you’re taking in the eyes of Google. 
  • Record these activities as proof that you are removing unwanted links and taking protective measures for the SEO health of your website.

Disavow Spam Backlinks

Here’s your process for using the Google Disavow Tool to protect your website from spam backlinks, broken down step-by-step:

  1. Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Search Console to gather a list of toxic backlinks. These tools will help you pinpoint low-quality or spammy links that could harm your site’s SEO.
  2. Once you have identified harmful backlinks, create a Disavow file. This file should list the URLs or domains you want Google to ignore. Be very cautious—only include truly harmful backlinks to avoid disavowing legitimate ones.
  3. Log into Google Search Console, navigate to the Disavow Links tool, and upload your Disavow file. This action tells Google not to count those links in its assessment of your site.
  4. Keep an eye on your backlink profile to detect any new spam links. Set up regular checks using spam backlink tools to stay ahead of harmful links that could negatively impact your site.

Preventing Spam Backlinks 

It is crucial to monitor the backlink profile more often to avoid letting spam backlinks ruin all SEO work. Tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush will trace the backlinks and allow one to set notifications if there are abnormal, unnatural increases in backlink activity. You can easily spot potential backlink spam and take early measures before aggravating the problem.

Your focus should be on the creation of quality organic backlinks through the creation of link-worthy content on trusted websites. Avoid using link schemes and automated programs to build links, as they often generate low-quality, spammy backlinks. Opt for organic and relevant backlinks that contribute toward your site’s reputation.

And though it may seem easy, excessive or irrelevant link exchanges only lead to poor-quality links. Be selective, ensure the exchanges are relevant, and add value to your niche.

Use analytics tools regularly to look for suspicious referral traffic and block spammy domains through your hosting settings or firewall to avoid further issues. By following these strategies, you can minimize the occurrence of spam backlinks and protect your website’s SEO health.

Expert opinion

Building a strong, natural link profile is the best defense against spammy links.

Ekta Chauhan

Link Builder, Outreach Monks

  • Summary
Spam backlinks must be handled and removed for good SEO. Reach out to webmasters for link removal or use automation tools like SEMrush for efficient removal. Keep an eye on your backlink profile, create quality content that will attract organic backlinks, and avoid link schemes to avoid getting spam backlinks and protect your site’s SEO health.

Conclusion

Protecting your website from spam backlinks is essential to maintaining SEO health. To do this, regular monitoring with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrumh will allow early detection of toxic links. It should be disavowed and, when possible, taken down through outreach to ensure your website avoids being hit for such spam backlinks.

SEO is highly based on a backlink profile, and the key role will be building backlinks organically and avoiding spam. A clean and qualitative backlink profile automatically generates high credibility for the website for visibility on the search rankings for higher traffic; hence, better results of overall online appearance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Spam backlinks are poor-quality, irrelevant links from untrustworthy sites that can hurt your website’s SEO and reputation. They usually originate with the intention to deceive the search rankings and may result in penalties if left unattended.

Spam backlinks can result in poor ranking in search engines, loss of traffic, and even penalties from Google. They destroy the credibility and visibility of your site, which is very dangerous for long-term SEO.

Run an audit of your website’s backlink profile using SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Both of these tools enable you to filter out low-quality or irrelevant links, highlight suspicious anchor texts, and identify toxic backlinks.

Well, you can get in contact with webmasters from which toxic links are coming and request the removal of those links. You can also use Google’s Disavow Tool and tell Google not to consider harmful links to your site, which would save it from penalties.

Always monitor your backlink profile with SEO tools, focus on organic backlink building methods that are qualitative, and avoid link schemes or excessive link exchanges. Quality backlinks will happen organically from trusted sites containing valuable content.