How to Identify Spammy Links and What to do About Them

September 7th 2021 | By Emma Grant

Google’s recent link spam update was introduced with the aim of fighting link spam, backing the search engine’s policy of rewarding high quality content.

Google considers the amount of links coming into a website in an attempt to understand what content could be useful to searchers. But if those links have not been earned honestly and are not properly deserved, then Google is not going to be happy about it. This is because it doesn’t like its web users being misled as to the relevancy or quality of a web page.

Google best practice

A website that has acquired links through means that are in breach of Google’s best practice guidelines is likely to lose any rankings it has achieved following the link spam update. And site owners who are expecting to see results from link building campaigns will be disappointed if their efforts are based around illegitimate practice.

The best practice policy, in short, dictates that website owners should invest in creating exceptional content and building an authoritative and trustworthy website that’s user friendly, making it naturally attractive to other sites to link back to or for users to share.

Many websites that have been around for a while are likely to have collected a few spammy links along the way. As SEO has evolved over the years, so link building practices have been through various phases. This is why many SEO agencies still find themselves trying to untangle the back-linking chaos left behind by the old black hat practices.

But however your site has acquired spammy links, it’s important to identify them and deal with them, because they are seriously going to affect your ability to rank in the Google search results, which will seriously reduce your online visibility and negatively affect sales. Even if you have a number of great quality links, if you have a few bad ones, you could find ALL your links devalued.

How to identify spammy links?

Spammy links, also known as low quality backlinks, are the ones that come from poor authority sites. They can be identified quite easily by a sharp spike in web traffic which will usually come from areas outside your reach, often overseas. You can identify these using Google Analytics or similar web analytics programs.

Guest posts

A low quality guest post, where a third party writes short, less-than-relevant content for your site and shoehorns an unnatural link into the text is one example of a low quality back-linking strategy. Any content of this nature that’s on your website should therefore be removed.

Link directories

Link directories are another example of old, black hat SEO practices. SEO agencies back in the day would submit websites to all manner of link directories in exchange for reciprocal links, regardless of whether they were relevant or held good authority. Whilst some online directories can be beneficial for local SEO, they do need to be relevant to the website to hold any advantage. If you have any links coming in from irrelevant, low domain authority directories, then you should take steps to have them removed.

Forum or blog comments

How many comments have you seen posted or submitted to your blog that include a ‘further reading’ link? This is a prime example of link spam and, if you have any of these types of links coming into your site, either from blogs or forums, you will need to remove them.

What to do about spammy links?

First things first, you’ll need to make sure you are not actively attracting spammy links. So, be clear on how your SEO agency is running your back-linking campaign.

The best ones will be producing high quality content which place relevant links on high quality platforms. The content is well-written, useful, relevant and on-tone for the brand. This, and ensuring a great user experience across your website, is the best way to attract natural, good quality links.

A reminder of what Google says:

“Site owners should make sure that they are following the best practices on links, both incoming and outgoing. Focusing on producing high quality content and improving user experience always wins out compared to manipulating links. Promote awareness of your site using appropriately tagged links, and monetise it with properly tagged affiliate links.”

But what to do about existing low quality backlinks?

Firstly, be prepared for a bit of a time consuming process. After you’ve identified your poor quality links, you will need to start the process of asking the webmaster of the sites that are linking back to you to remove the link.

If you don’t hear back within two weeks, then you will need to take things to the next stage, which involves using resources such as the Google disavow links tool. This tool in particular was launched during the Google Penguin update to allow webmasters to let Google know that they didn’t want certain backlinks taken into account when assessing the website. The only thing is that the signal is one that Google may choose to ignore.

Google actually advises only to use the disavow tool when really necessary. Overuse it, and you could find yourself negating the wrong links. The best thing to do, says Google, is to go through the process of asking webmasters to remove the links you don’t want coming in to your site.

Best practice link building campaigns, from an SEO agency trusted London and Surrey wide

If you’d like advice on which links could be having a negative effect on your site’s ability to rank in the search engines, and are looking for help in building good quality links and getting rid of spammy links, talk to Figment where our team has been achieving top class SEO results for local businesses for many years.

All our strategies follow Google’s best practice guidelines, including our link building tactics. We also focus on creating quality, shareable content and user-friendly SEO websites.

To discover how we could help YOUR business achieve the online visibility it needs to increase sales, you are welcome to get in touch.