One of the many ways to get a penalty for you website is through having spammy links leading to your website. But knowing which links are high quality and which links are not can be a bit tricky and you may need to be a little bit more careful in assessing which websites you want to remove your links from, or you’ll end up removing those which took you a long time to build.
So how do you go about identifying the good ones from the bad? One way to find out is to manually review each and every one of them. If the link is of high quality, mark it in a spreadsheet. If not, add them to the list of links you need to remove.
Here are a few other ways you can tell which links are good and which ones are low quality:
- Know whether the URL is indexed by Google. To find out, make a Google search for “site.(name of the domain).com”. If the site does not return any search results, then you need to remove the link.
- Make sure that the link doesn’t appear in different pages of one website. Site-wide links can also qualify as a spammy link. So if you have links appearing in almost all pages in one website, you may need to remove them or nofollow them. One way to find out if you have site-wide links is through Ahrefs.
- Check if the link appears in a shady link directory. One way to find out is to verify if they contain words like “backlink”, “SEO“ and “links”. There’s a big chance that they are low quality links and must be removed.
- Unless you’re very active in a forum and you have provided a link in one of the discussions purely as a resource for a solution, then it’s fine. However, if you have listed in a forum where you have never posted before, or are a member of a forum just so you can get a linkback to your website, then it’s time to remove the link. The same concept can be applied to social media websites and social bookmarks.
