As your website gains authority and visibility in the search engines, you will inevitably attract toxic backlinks.
Toxic backlinks are links from websites that are not designed to educate, inform, or even entertain. They are created purely for ‘black hat’ purposes and are never even visited by real people.
Here’s a useful guide on how to spot toxic backlinks.
So why does your website attract these kinds of links? It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves, at one time or another.
Sometimes it is due to ‘negative SEO’.
That’s where a competitor tries to damage your rankings by directing low quality backlinks to your website. Alternatively, toxic links can come from people who want to charge you a fee to have them removed.
Wherever they come from, links from spammy websites will damage the SEO of your website.
Ideally, you should ask the linking websites to remove your link. But very often they will ask for a fee to remove the backlink. That, after all, is why they linked to you in the first place.
Google has provided a remedy to this: the Google disavow tool. When you upload a list of linking websites that you want to disavow, Google will ignore the links pointing to your site from those spammy websites.
You can identify toxic backlinks and disavow them in SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Monitor Backlinks.
