Any site, regardless of whether it participates in search engine promotion, can develop wrong external links over time. If a website’s link profile has a lot of trusted URLs, it’s premature to sound the alarm. But when a site has few natural links, the link base has only a few dozen domains, and some of them are spam, you need to urgently remove such links.
Having discovered the problem, the site owner is ready to urgently start cleaning the link profile, but how to do it? Often wrong links appear by themselves, or competitors have a hand creating them. To remove a link, you need access to the resource where it is located, and, of course, no one will provide this access. The situation is complicated because the search engine, due to such wrong links, can lower the website’s position in the search results or even impose sanctions on it.
Where do wrong links come from?
There can be several reasons for the appearance of spam links. As a rule, most often, this is due to the self-promotion of the site. Let’s consider all cases of spam URLs appearing in the link profile of a web resource:
- Catalogs. Trying to add a company profile to various directories, few people pay attention to the site’s quality. But guides are more often than other HS and are harmful since such sites, due to the vast number of external links, are often under the filters of search engines.
- Automatic services. Search promotion requires only manual work, without any automation of the process. Saving time, when launching the automated linking service, the site owner spoils the link profile of his project with his own hand because almost all sites in such services are of low quality and have zero trust.
What is fraught with automatic SEO, or how not to bring the site under the filter
- Runs on the base of freelancers. Many private optimizers offer a manual run through a high-quality database of donor sites. As an argument, freelancers cite high rates of attendance and site IQ. In fact, such databases are not much different from the databases of automatic services.
- Buying links on exchanges. By itself, the purchase of eternal links with proper site selection brings only pluses for SEO. But to find a quality web resource takes many hours of searching because many optimizers constantly use the joint link base of exchanges, and often, donor sites are teeming with external links. Many external URLs make the donor a garbage dump, and a link from it is only harmful.
- Drop in quality at donor sites. Any, even a very high-quality website, can eventually lose all trust and turn into a spam dump. An external link (previously valid) from this site will seriously harm the area.
- The work of competitors. In practice, such cases are rare because even such a position requires time and money. However, HS may also be at the suggestion of a competitor who ordered a run on low-quality donors.
How to find spam links?
Even being one hundred percent sure that there are no harmful links in the profile, the link base should be checked regularly. Some resources may lose positive indicators, and somewhere a low-quality link may appear automatically since third-party sites cannot be controlled. For verification, you can use both specialized programs, online services (for example, Ahrefs), and webmaster panels. In Yandex, the webmaster panel will provide information about where and when the external link was placed and its technical parameters. In Google, the data of external sites will have to be checked manually.
A complete list of services for checking the link mass
The worst-case scenario is when search engines find the spam links before you do. In such cases, a filter is applied to the website, and a corresponding message appears in the webmaster panel.
Removing harmful links
The most effective way to remove, no matter what, is to contact the owner of the site where the HS is located and then request that the harmful backup be removed. Unfortunately, no matter how unpromising this idea may seem, many web admins remove links when they are contacted.
The main difficulty lies in finding the webmaster’s contacts. Usually, commercial e-mail is added to the sites, and it is unlikely that it will be possible to resolve the issue with the manager. Alternatively, you can write to the domain owner through the whois service.
In search engines, the situation with the removal of links is different. Google allows you to report a spammy link to a search engine through the Disavow Links Tool in the Google Search Console. Yandex says that its algorithms see all the links and automatically decide whether to take them into account.
We recommend writing a letter to Yandex support from the HS lists. Yes, the response will be an automatic message, but there is a slight chance that company employees will see the list of URLs and take action to level them.
When ordering an automatic run service, or mass registration in catalogs, you can contact the support service where this service was purchased. There is a possibility that the administrator will write a letter to the web admins of the sites asking them to remove the links.
Alas, often, the runs are done by programs, and the services have no contact with the web admins of the sites in principle.
In purchasing through link exchanges, you can disable, close from indexing, or remove external links yourself. All primary link services have similar functionality.
In cases where it is impossible to remove the link on the exchange, it is necessary to write a letter to the service administration and resolve the issue through them.
Conclusion
As you can understand from the article, removing links is a highly complicated process. It does not always lead to success. Therefore, if you decide to increase the link mass, do it correctly using our checklist. There is no complete guarantee that a spam link will not appear on the site over time, so we recommend checking the link base at least once every three months.