Bad or Toxic Link occurs due to the number of Google Webmaster Guidelines violating factors namely building unnatural low-quality backlinks to your website, making use of the link exchange schemes, if you buy links from untrustworthy and low-quality SEO Company, etc.
What to do when you find a bad link in your site?
Google Disavow Tools is the first thing everyone gets in their mind if they find a bad link on their website, so what will the Disavow tool do?
Will it clear your bad links on the website? No, they provide the instruction to the search algorithm that they should not make use of them or count them when analyzing a site.
Steps to use Disavow Tool to abolish the Toxic or Bad Links
Proceed below to check out the steps you can try to diminish the toxic list from your website.
1. Try Manually
Before trying out the Disavow tool you need to check for the possibilities to remove them manually by yourself, it means outreaching.
If you can contact someone to remove the links, you can email them and request for the removal of links, and this will help in complete removal of the bad links rather than keeping it hidden from search engines.
2. Sorting out the Toxic Links
There are some characteristics to consider when finding the bad links. You need to ask the below questions if you doubt specific links of your website,
- If your anchor text and keywords are unnatural.
- If you do not find a relevant content based on the topic.
- If the link is in the footer but hidden at the back of HTML.
- If the links redirect to an unconnected or unrelated page.
- In the case of the links moving to spammy websites.
You can make use of Search Consoles to find these toxic links, so here are some of the illustrations you can follow.
- Login to Search Console and click on the website property you need to analyze.
- Check for the “Search Traffic” option located on your sidebar menu once you have clicked on the property.
- Clicking the “Search Traffic” will result in a set of options and from that click on the “Links to your Site.”
- You will get a page with all of your links listed, and click on the “Who links the most” section and choose “More” from it.
- You will get a set of links listed, and those will be the domains that are linking to your website. You can download them for the future reference.
- You will find two buttons at the top namely “Download more sample links” and “Download latest links” which will help in finding the right unnatural links to your site.
Apart from the search console, you can also make use of other backlink explorers namely Ahrefs, Majestic, Open Site Explorer, etc. To find out the toxic links.
3. Organize your Toxic Links
You need to submit the set of toxic links in .txt when you disavow links, so make sure you change the format and then submit.
Converting them is not tougher, you just need to copy and paste them in a google document, and from the file, option click on “Download as ” and choose the plain text option so that you will have your toxic links organized in a text file. Make sure that every link is in the separate line while submitting the text file to the disavow tool.
How to Make use of Disavow tool now?
You can visit here to reach the Disavow tool; you need to choose the preferred website and click on the Disavow links. You will be redirected to a page with a warning in highlighted yellow color that you are going to do something irreversible and essential.
Just click on the “Disavow Links” to provide the instruction to the search engine not to consider the links. Once you have clicked the link, the tool will ask you to upload the text file with your toxic links, just choose the file and submit them.
Yeah! The work is done, you have stopped the bad links to show up on the search results using the disavow tool. Make sure you are not making the same mistake again.