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If a site links to your site, Google see it as a vote for the quality of your site. By creating quality content and increasing the popularity of your site you can gain backlinks to your site.
However, not all the links are good for your site. Links from spam sites may harm your site’s quality ratings and hence your rankings in Google.
So, how do a quality business website ends up getting links from spam sites?
Sometimes businesses end up with those who claim to be SEOs and perform shady SEO practices resulting in spam links or other link schemes that violate Google’s guidelines . In some cases, it may be as a result of hacking or natural spam activities and in rare cases your rival may have done this.
Here at WebsitFix, we believe in quality SEO and making backlinks of very high quality either by creating a great content strategy, providing great user experience to those visiting client’s site or increasing the site’s popularity by the methods recommended by Google.
There are quite a few clients who approach us for help after their site have suffered from bad backlinks as a result of shady SEO. We’re always happy to help the clients recover from this difficult situation.
Many of our online users have asked us questions on how to recover from bad links. To help out those who are keen to know how to clean up the bad links profile, here is what you can do.
Note: Be very careful before you decide to disavow all of the links that you think are bad. Only disavow if you are absolutely sure these link may be harming your rankings else it can backfire. Disavowing many or all links at the same time may negatively effect your rankings.
Disavow backlinks
If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site. This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution.
How-To Disavow backlinks
Using tools like Google search console, or open site explorer or ahrefs backlinks, make a list of all the backlinks. Our SEOs at WesbiteFix use multiple tools to make sure no backlink is missed.
Use this to create a text file (the file type must be .txt and it must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII) containing only the links you want to disavow—one link per line. If you want Google to ignore all links from an entire domain (like example.com), add the line “domain:example.com”. Your text file can include additional information about excluded links, as long as each line of description begins with the “#” character (all lines beginning with # will be ignored). Don’t upload the entire list of links to your site: the text file that you upload is the list of links you want Google to ignore.
Example
Here’s a sample of a valid file:
# example.com removed most links, but missed these http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html # Contacted owner of shadyseo.com on 7/1/2012 to # ask for link removal but got no response domain:shadyseo.com
If you want Google to ignore all links from an entire domain (like example.com), add the line domain:example.com.
Upload a list of links to disavow
- Go to the disavow links tool page.
- Select your website.
- Click Disavow links.
- Click Choose file.
Note: Uploading a new file will replace all previously uploaded ones.
It may take some time for Google to process the information you’ve uploaded. In particular, this information will be incorporated into our index as we recrawl the web and reprocess the pages that we see, which can take a number of weeks. These links will continue to be shown in the Search Console inbound links section.
If your site is badly affected by the shady SEO practices in the past and suffering in Google rankings, we are happy to help you recover. Contact us now .
Vikas Rana
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