Are toxic backlinks hurting your website? 

I don’t know about you, but I remember a time where AOL and Yahoo! ruled the internet and places like Amazon and eBay were just so helpful that nobody would think of hurting them or their reputation lest they disappear!

Alas, times have changed, and today the internet world is not just competitive, it’s HYPER competitive. If you don’t know about SEO, adwords, user experience and eCommerce best practices, then unfortunately you can be sure that your competitors are laughing as they snap up all of your potential customers.

At WCD, we champion our customers, which means we give them the know-how to make sure they can stand up and have a fair place in the market. One of the ways we do that is by helping them remove toxic backlinks from their website.

What is a toxic backlink? 

A backlink is where a website links to another website. This is often a legitimate directory, social media account or partner company. A toxic backlink is where a website which is deemed as very unsafe by Google contains links to your website, often without your knowledge. 

Why is this bad? 

Well Google is essentially a machine for providing answers. It has a set of criteria when deciding what answers to give someone who uses their search. The first comes down to the words used on the pages to describe what they do… 

Hang on – there are lots of websites who use basically the same words to describe what they do! How does Google decide then? 

Well, there are secondary pieces of information Google evaluates to give the user the best answer such as:

1. Is this website still active?

and

2. Is this website trustworthy?

So, you might say, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, I’m a perfect businessperson! My website is active and we are very trustworthy!’ – and so you might be, but unfortunately in today’s online world, Google also takes your business partners into account and so it looks at backlinks –  who you associate with – as part of your reputation.

In the exact same way that someone leaving bad reviews for your business can hurt your business reputation, so too can bad partner links hurt your reputation with Google search rankings. 

What is a backlink attack?

Much of the time backlinks are valid. They can come from search engines, blogs and all sorts of perfectly fine places. More recently though, we have seen a big increase in the number of people getting linked to toxic websites which hurt their reputation without them even knowing. 

While it can be impossible to know why certain websites are targeted by toxic backlinks, they are typically in very competitive markets and the attacks happen very quickly. Often companies get linked to hundreds or thousands of websites which hurt their rankings greatly. 

Left unchecked, these toxic backlinks can mean businesses drop down the search engine rankings, often through no fault of their own. As part of our service for our customers, we take the responsibility to prevent this from happening. We have invested in tools to perform an audit of every backlink connected to a website and regularly disavow toxic websites. 

In other words, we take steps to make sure Google will not consider harmful websites as partners or penalise our clients in the search rankings. That means they can protect their hard won reputation and not be taken advantage of in the online space. 

We highly recommend that you get an understanding of your backlinks and make sure you are not also under attack! There are many tools out there which can help but we would be more than willing to offer our services in the fight against backlink attacks.