Dealing with (bad) backlinks
As much as we advocate holistic SEO here at Yoast, there will always be people turning to the dark side, employing less than savory techniques for their own gain. When someone targets a website with actions intended to lower its ranking in the SERPs, it’s called ‘negative SEO’.
Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about link building strategies and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!!
One way people can try to damage a site’s rankings is by getting loads of unnatural, shady links to point to a website. Now, you shouldn’t worry about being the target of a negative SEO attack like that the moment you notice a drop in your rankings! In most cases, the cause is something else. But, if you ascertained that there’s suddenly a great many shady backlinks to your site, it may be time to take action. Google’s disavow links tool allows you to ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site. But is it OK to use this tool, and is it always necessary? Let’s discuss in today’s Ask Yoast!
Shant emailed us about this predicament:
I noticed about 18,000 links to my domain in Google Search Console from a few unethical websites. I suspect someone is targeting me with negative SEO, but my rankings are currently not affected. Should I still disavow these 18,000 links to my domain or could this harm my ranking? Or will Google’s algorithm realize this is a negative SEO effort and ignore them?
Watch the video or read the transcript below for the answer!
Dealing with bad backlinks
“Well, if you don’t want those links, then disavowing them doesn’t really hurt you. If you know how to disavow them, by all means, do it. And you can disavow at a domain level, so if they only come from a few domains then just disavow those entire domains. If they’re not links you’re proud of, then they’re probably not helping you rank either.
But, if it’s not really hurting your rankings at the moment, then you can also just do nothing because, yes, Google will usually figure out a lot of this by itself and say, “Hey, these domains are really, really shady and we should not allow these links to do anything. Good luck.”
Read more: Clean up your bad backlinks »
So, what happens if you get lots of links from one site? Would Google consider that as suspicious, and could you, therefore, be penalized?
We got a similar question from Gabriel Heffes:
“I recently had a post on Tumblr that was reblogged and resulted in 9000 links to my page, making Tumblr and that post the most link-sending post. Will these thousands of links cause a Penguin penalty and hurt my rankings?”
Check out the video or transcript below for the answer!
Are backlinks from one source dangerous?
“The honest answer is: no. This is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. Google knows how Tumblr works. It can see that these links are not bought or in any other way bad. So don’t worry about them. Celebrate the fact that you’ve got so many links on Tumblr! And make sure you’ll create another post like this because it will actually help in your ranking. Good luck!”
Keep reading: 6 tips to a successful link building strategy »
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glad it was really helpful my site has been hacked and done with a lots of spammy backlinks thanks i have got a clear view now thanks for sharing the article
No doubt that the bad links will get your site banned by the google but in my point of view google will let you know whats going wrong with your site and why? and it will defiantly tell us how to get rid of that penalty.
I wonder how would Google let other competitors hurt rankings of some other competing website this seems to be impossible to be. I heard the game that competitors also click on the PPC ads of their competitors for raising their costs but this links game is out of my logic I personally believe that does not work anymore.
Great post.
The negative seo is often difficult to identify and resolve.
Until last year the number of domains for the disavow was limited (numerically). Has it been updated recently?
thank you.
It’s very useful for me because Nowadays I am also getting some spammy backlinks.
It is probably worth noting though that negative SEO via links is only one, most obvious (and more often than not, not very successful) kind of negative SEO
Hi Joost,
It is very long time I follow your website and I have your plugin in all the websites. Probably more than 5 years. I went to Amsterdam and I thought to pay a visit to you, but then I didn’t want to bother as you probably were busy. I hope to meet you some day in Dublin during some conference.
Do you think now the use of Google Disavow tool can be ignored in case of spammy or negative seo once for all? I know for example while I am using SemRush, I gets notifications of “toxic backlinks” which I always put into the disavow list.
What do you think on backlinks who are not created for negative SEO but for adding ranking, but they are still considered kind of spammy, unnatural to get, blatantly with SEO in mind. Would those still ignored by Google or maybe could be potentially be triggered for a penalty?
Cheers,
Donald
Being a blogger its necessary to create back link which is very help full for website marketing and in this thing role of SEO is very important.
It’s very useful for me because Nowadays I am also getting some spammy backlinks.
Thanks
It happened to me recently when someone tried to spam me with low quality spammy sites. And with recent google update it really effected my ranking too.
I already disavowed them, but i think i was bit late, waiting for next update hope that will do good to me.
Facing same kind of situation these days with thousands of links from some domains looking shady and clone sites of one another. In confusion whether disavow or not because one site with DA 38 and other is 28 but others are less. These sites are search engine type like fetching results from Google. Can i proceed to disavow them?
Anyone clear this doubt?
I found google’s disavow tool to be really helpful at this.. I gotta admit it was a rocket science to me at first..
But i later figure out how to use the tool and I got those shaddy links off my site’s tail.
then about 20days later or thereabout.. All those shady links were completely off my site and my rankings went back up..
Thanks YoasT!! Thanks Google
Seriously I never felt if that feature exists in Yoast. Previously my site has attacked with negative SEO. It took me days to identify, list and disavow those shady links.
Joost this blog post helped me discover this new feature. I will surely check it out.