If you are a web designer, blogger, etc., a topic you might be familiar with is backlinks. As you probably know, backlinks are crucial to the success of your website.
We will discuss this below, but you should know that good backlinks increase your SEO ranking. The more high-quality backlinks there are to your site, the higher Google and other search engines will place you on their lists of search results when somebody searches for a related topic.
You may be familiar with backlinks, but have you heard of toxic backlinks? As you can probably guess, these are not good, and they will do your site more harm than good.
If you’re not sure if your website has toxic backlinks that are negatively impacting your SEO rating, you can use specific tools to perform a backlink analysis.
This article discusses good backlinks, toxic backlinks, spotting them, what results in a toxic backlink, and more.
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks occur when a website links to another site. For example, if you have a site about automobile repair and someone with an auto repair blog links to you, that qualifies as a backlink for you. They are also known as inbound or incoming links.
Not all backlinks are the same. Some backlinks are considered legit and high-quality backlinks that will help your SEO rankings. Then there are toxic backlinks that will harm your ranking score. Let’s examine the difference between a quality backlink and a toxic backlink.
What’s a Quality Backlink?
This is a little bit difficult to define. Essentially, a quality backlink is a link that someone else has added to their site, usually to some sort of blog post, because it has editorial value.
The person who has linked to your site sees your site as valuable, useful and that it provides some sort of legitimate – something that people may y want to check out if they are interested in that topic.
A quality backlink usually comes from a reputable website. They have to come from trusted sources, from places that Google considers authorities or legitimate sources of information.
For backlinks to be high-quality, both websites that are linked need to cover the same topic or be relatively closely related. The other qualifying factor of a good backlink is that it can send referral traffic your way; people can click on it and visit your site.
Related: 5 Benefits of Using People Search Engine
What’s a Toxic Backlink?
Now that we know what a quality backlink is let’s discuss what a toxic backlink is. A toxic backlink is often defined as any link designed primarily to alter or manipulate a website’s rank on a search engine. When it is evident that backlinking is being done to boost SEO rankings, it will generally be considered a toxic backlink.
Various factors can contribute to bad backlinks. The tricky thing is that to qualify as a good backlink, the link must be from a trusted source; it must have value, and it needs to be topically related. For backlinks to be fair, they must meet all these criteria.
However, various criteria cause a backlink to be considered toxic, but here, a backlink really only needs to meet a single criterion to be considered toxic. Therefore, it’s much easier for a backlink to be considered toxic than quality. So, what will cause Google and other search engines to determine that a backlink is toxic?
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Final Thoughts
Suppose you are in the process of building a new site or expanding a current one. In that case, we recommend performing a backlink analysis to determine how many backlinks you have and how high they are in quality and whether they are toxic. If they are toxic, you will need to figure out a way to remove them and fast.
