How To Deal With Bad Quality Links

How To Deal With Bad Quality Links

Deal With Bad Quality LinksIt is common search engine optimization knowledge that getting relevant website’s linking to you is a key component in getting high search engine rankings.  We therefore see companies regularly going on  link building sprees in an effort to climb up the search engine ladder. While companies try to build a higher quantity of links, there is always cases where they forget about link quality.

For webmasters, low quality incoming links become a concern with fears the site’s reputation will be damaged and Google in turn, may not deem the site as relevant. Having low-quality incoming links can be considered as "being part of a bad link neighbourhood," which may prove fatal to your site’s ranking capabilities. Google has tried to help those fears with a recent blog post ‘Dealing with low-quality backlinks‘ on Google Webmaster Central Blog. In this blog post, other than quality links Google stated some of the most significant factors in Google’s ranking algorithms:

  • Unique, engaging content or useful tools and services.
  • Web site structure
  • Whether the words of a user’s query appear in the title, and/or how close the words are on the page.

Google’s Suggested Actions To Counter Low Quality Backlinks

Back links

Contact The Site Linking To You

Remember that Google is not responsible for removing links from its search engine.  What it is responsible to do is spider the web for relevant content.  If you do not like the content of a site that is linking to you the first step is to try to speak with the website owner and see if they will willingly remove the link.

Focus On Improving Your Website

What Google is basically saying here is do not spend a lot of time on getting a bad link removed.  If it really was that huge an issue then we would be seeing every competitor of a company getting your company on bad link neighborhoods!  Chances are that a bad link will not stand the test of time and that Google may very well have discounted it already.

Instead focus on improving your site.  Give your web site an audit.  Review both the usability and conversion of your site.  Does it have a sales funnel?  Are you clear on what the goals of the site are?  Can you offer some tools to attract and retain new visitors?  Complete testing to ensure your website is consistently improved.  These are the things that will attract positive website experience and also improve links from strong and relevant web sites.

While doing a link building exercise, you should take care to avoid being baited by the gimmicks of poor quality link vendors.  Build a site that is well organized, with strong content and let your site do the talking!  

It's a competitive market. Contact us to learn how you can stand out from the crowd.

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6 Comments

  • avatar

    Asha,
    I know this js a post from way back (2 years ago) but, I had problems with bad (unranked) sites linking back to me and costing me valuable pagerank.  My website somchat.com was one day ranked pr5 by Google and a few days later got ranked pr3.  I realized what changed in the those two days.  
    I posted several posts to my blogger blog.  Unfortunately, about 20 unranked blogs (the owners) decided that what I had was good for their audience and so made some back links to the new blog posts on my site.  It was nice gesture by them.  Except when Google crawled those sites, it immediately -I think it was less than 48 hours since their links was made – my Google PR changed from a PR5 to a PR3.  Since I check my PR daily – I think I'm obsessed with PR- I noticed the dramatic decrease of my blog's PR.  So I done a little research and came to conclusion that the incoming links by those (About 20 sites actually) unranked sites dropped my sites page rank.
    As a measure of hope, I contacted most of the site owners promising I will to them as a favor if they removed their links to my site and most of them agreed.  So, the question is, will my site's page rank go back to PR5 or will take long time for Google to remove those unwanted links from their index and re-rank my site appropriately?

  • avatar

    Excellent article but I’m still left pondering what you might prefer as an substitute. Could Good alternatives to generate traffic be a combination of traffic origination tools, viral traffic tools and incentives?

  • avatar

    Jay:
    As unethical and image tarnishing exercises have become the norm in the online world, we have no other choice but tp be alert. That is the only way to safeguard our site from the risks of vulnerabilities. Google already made it very clear that it won’t deal with removing bad back links in web sites from its index.

  • avatar

    Asha, those are good tips. Totally agree with the tips on “improving your website”. Spending a few hours each day, writing articles, participating in forums, writing reviews and other activities will help generate a positive web presence.
    Also the bad link will move on down the first page of results and move on to the next.

  • avatar

    Time saving and practical tips.
    Even though I am a keen follower of google blogs, I have missed that post. Thanks for making me aware of it, wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.

  • avatar

    Informative post Asha ! It would be great if you can elaborate on “If it really was that huge an issue then we would be seeing every competitor of a company getting your company on bad link neighborhoods! “. How can Google track if the competitor submit our site links to bad sites making it a bad site link and it’s not that easy to get a link removed once posted?

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