Link building is not just about building new links, sometimes it entails link removal. You need to get rid of low quality links and/or inorganic links. If you’re wondering how you may end up with these links, they may have been placed there by an SEO company that you hired or you may have created some of the links yourself. In some instances, a third party may have created inorganic or unnatural links for you.
Some examples where inorganic links may appear are:
- Low quality articles and directory submissions
- Paid links
- Automated link exchanges
- Fake profiles
- Artificial blog networks or blogrolls
These types of links can get your site penalised and since several sites have resorted to using guest blogging links which also resulted to getting penalized, link removal has now become a common solution for business owners who want to optimise their websites for search engines.
The most obvious solution to this problem is to focus on developing good quality links and prohibiting bad ones. In fact, before thinking of acquiring new links, you need to get rid of inorganic and/or low quality links. You need to make sure that the linking domains are of good quality and you have to get rid of spam links.
Apart from watching out for low quality or inorganic links, you also need to pay attention to a link’s relevance to your site and content. Following are some things to consider to spot which links are relevant to your site:
- Does the linking site belong to the same industry/topic as your site?
- Are keywords found on your site linking to the page of the linking site?
- Are the keywords of the outbound link Anchor Text found on the linking site’s webpage?
How do you remove low quality or inorganic links from your website?
First, try to send an email to the linking site, stating politely that you are requesting for link removal. However, it is uncertain whether the webmaster of the linking site will, in fact, read your request and remove the link. For webmasters, adding links can be difficult and removing said links may be even harder. In many cases, requests for link removal are ignored. This calls for more decisive action.
If you cannot get a webmaster to remove a link and your site’s ranking is negatively affected while you lose traffic, it’s time for you to use Google’s Disavow Tool.
By using this tool, you can specify which links Google should ignore to prevent any manual or algorithmic action against your website.