Backlinks to your website are important. Search Engines like Google use these as ranking factors. Positive backlinks improve where you appear on a search engine result page. Negative backlinks can adversely affect your site. Let's run through the basics.
Backlink: "an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website." Source: Google
Negative backlinks to a website can happen. It may be "Negative SEO" from a competitor, a SEO service provider, or the source may be unknown. Most businesses are unaware of these less than ideal links to their website when they do exist. Spammy links can trigger a Manual Review from Google. This is what you need to avoid.
Negative SEO: Another party purchases links to your website from spammy, artificial, or low-quality websites. Or, a web developer/SEO company buys poor links to your site.
Manual Actions Report: Most of the time Google can determine if a site is spammy. For the rest there is a human review process. When you check the the report in Google Search Console, you want the message "No manual webspam actions found."
Steps You Can Take To Combat Spammy Backlinks
Negative SEO: Another party purchases links to your website from spammy, artificial, or low-quality websites. Or, a web developer/SEO company buys poor links to your site. Ask the webmaster to remove them.
The first step every time.
Remove the pages that the links point to.
Definitely less than ideal for many reasons.
Change your domain name.
We really hope it would never come to this.
Disavow backlinks.
Per Google: "We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
The first step is to monitor your backlinks using a tool that helps to judge if a site is trustworthy. This also helps with a strategy to build more positive links to your website. MOZ offers a free tool that gives you a snapshot of your current backlinks, their smap score and your domains overall spam score.
Reach out to us to interpret what you find and to dive in deeper. Or, post a question in our Facebook or LinkedIn groups.
