- August 19, 2022
Table of Contents
Bad Links or Toxic Links are the links, which are pointing to your website as backlinks. Backlinks are an important part in optimizing your SEO. Toxic links are poor backlinks can be determined by Toxic Score. It is always good for your website to disavowing those toxic links (poor backlinks) using Google’s Disavow Tool.
Good backlinks can have a positive impact on our SEO while the Poor backlinks can have the opposite effect. These poor backlinks can affect your SEO by lowering the positioning for keywords in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Also, the poor backlinks lower your domain ranks on Google.
With the use of any Backlink Audit tools, you can find out the poor backlinks (toxic links) by manually checking each link. For example, to do a backlink audit SEMrush tool is one of the best tools for backlinks research. Below is the backlinks overview screenshot of a website:
Here, SEMrush tool splits backlinks in 3 categories: Toxic (Poor/Danger Backlinks), Potentially Toxic (Not-bad-not-good), Non-toxic (Good Backlinks). For detailed information, find the below screenshot (Backlink Audit Dashboard):
Here, the red color highlighted is the Toxic Score, determined by SEMrush Backlink Audit tool. The score is between 0 to 100 as follows:
Most of the toxic links come from:
– Spam sites and websites that are created only for link building.
– Websites which were not indexed by Google.
– Websites with a virus or malware.
– Link networks.
Once the backlinks are exported from the tool, you simply open each link in your browser. Before you adding a link into disavow list, make sure that particular link is really a Toxic Link. If you don’t know how to determine, check that link using Moz Toolbar Chrome Extension in your browser, like the below screenshot:
Here, red color highlighted is a Spam Score of that link and it is dangerous link (spam score more that 10%). So you can add this link into the Disavow links list.
Do Not Consider the below from the Toxic Links
Below are the must-follow instructions from Google when preparing a Disavow Links:
To disavow a domain (or subdomain) prefix it with “domain:”, for example: domain:example.com
The file must be a text file encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII
The file name must end in .txt
Maximum URL length is 2,048 characters
Maximum file size is 100,000 lines (including blank lines and comment lines) and 2MB.
You can include comments if you like by starting a line with a # mark. Any lines that begin with # will be ignored by Google.
Example:
# Two pages to disavow
http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html
http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html
# One domain to disavow
domain:shadyseo.com
There is no exact time frame for disavow links take process. It’s all based on the website’s crawlability (how frequently GoogleBot access your website). Some of the websites effective within a week and some of the websites may effective after a month. But, it will effective immediately once GoogleBot checked your website’s Toxic Links list.
Hope you’re get the required information through this article, if not feel free to comment us related queries! Thanks!