People are talking about trusted links giving benefits to websites and untrusted backlinks giving penalties or trouble in search engines. Today we are going to discuss some of the most common forms of risky backlinks after the recent penguin and EMD updates. You will be able to learn why it’s essential to do backlink research before you engage in finding new links.
5 types of toxic links
When working with backlinks you should carefully consider which new sites refers back to your website. If you do link building in the wrong manner, search engine ranking in Google might drop dramatically. Here are a few examples and solutions if the problem is already there:
1. A majority of links with low trust
Business built around low quality backlinks (eg. Sites without any trust) are one of the top targets in the recent Google updates (EMD and penguin). Just building links for the sake of it and to increase the numbers are not working in 2012. Today, Google’s algorithm has a strong correlation between worthless links and poor search engine ranking.
Solution: Rather get a few trusted links instead of 100’s of low quality ones. Take your time building good content and backlinks – nothing happened overnight.
2. A high degree of links without power
If your website only get links from websites without any power, it will never succeed. A high degree of weak backlinks indicate that nobody trustworthy believe in your site. However, don’t aim for the most powerful links but try to be referred by average and decent sites to begin with.
Solution: Focus on getting links from better neighbourhoods instead.
3. Too much unnatural anchor text are never good
Sites getting most of their incoming links with money keywords while not receiving many brand keywords in the anchor text are seen as unnatural and manipulated. If you’re doing a genuine work and build a reliable business, this will hopefully come naturally. On the other hand, if most of the links are built around money keywords you have to change the strategy and change some of the incoming links.
Solution: Build links like a brand. Make it look natural. Don’t use money keywords in an unnatural manner.
4. Links without power AND trust
One of the most toxic type of backlinks are of course the ones without both power and trust. It’s very obvious for search engines that they are built one for the purpose of gaining search engine ranking.
Solution: Make sure to lower the amount of backlinks with both low trust and power or it might look like your website is not trustworthy. Simultaneously, increase the amount of good backlinks.
5. Very few deeplinks
If over ¾ of your incoming links are leading to the start page of your website, you might be in trouble. Spread out your best content on various sub-pages and make it easy to share and enjoy it. Otherwise, it might look like the links are not genuinely deserved.
Solution: Make new and focused content while spreading out the incoming links to sub-pages.
Finally, let’s talk about toxic links in the future.
6. High degree of links from foreign countries
In some verticals, it appears to be very common with backlink profiles with a majority of links from Russia, Ukraine, China etc. In some cases, it might of course be all natural. However, when sites got nothing to do with each other and the language are totally different; this can of course be suspicious.
It’s still not a negative factor, but I hope Google and Bing will consider looking more at sites having over 90 % of their incoming links from foreign countries – without any valid reasons. Often, we are talking about sites with over 5000 backlinks which makes this even fishier.
Toxic links: A short summary
Yes, toxic links exist and having too many usually lowers your search engine ranking – at least in Google. Having a few poisonous links are seldom a problem, but when a majority are of very low quality and seems to be in place to manipulate Google, your site is in danger.