This article will focus on Importance of Finding the Toxic Links. If you don’t want the wrath of Google Penguin to devastate your online presence, then it’s imperative that you don’t just wait for the doomsday, but rather start taking preventing measures to avoid the Penguin onslaught!
What Triggers the Penguin Penalty?
Basically, a website gets penalized for unnatural links, and a suspicious link profile, but the Penguin penalty isn’t imposed by Google right away… so what really happens is that webmasters feel confident after acquiring some cheeky links from link farms. And, as they continue to commit the same mistake over and again, one fine day, bunch of low-quality links basically trigger either a manual or an automated Penguin penalty.
And, that’s like the Doomsday for the webmaster, but it doesn’t really mean the latest link acquired, was the root cause of the problem… That is something people unfortunately fail to understand totally!
Shady SEO Firms Are Often the Trouble Makers
SEO companies are a dime a dozen these days, and just about every other freelancer claims to be a link builder, but in reality, majority of them acquire links from blog networks, and low quality sources. Many shoddy SEO firms also acquire cheap links in bulk, and often cause the site to fall under the Google’s radar for having a suspicious link profile.
If your SEO firm is the troublemaker, then you can file a re-inclusion request, and cite the reason to be wrongdoings of an SEO firm, and even list their name, if the need be.
Identifying the Toxic Links
Based on certain parameters like Moz rank, Trust rank, Alexa, and Google PR, the value of a link is determined, and there are a lot of detox tools that allow you to scan all the incoming links, and identify the toxic ones.
Once again, there are tons of SEO tools in the markets, and not all of them work equally well. You can take a look at Link Detox, Ahref, Moz, and similar reliable ones rather than trying your hand at something totally new.
Mostly, the links coming from pharma/adult/casino and gambling sites are considered to be toxic, and even the links coming from sites that have been blacklisted for distributing malware, have a similar issue. And, just a couple of links from such low quality sources can be quite disastrous for your website.
Disavow the Dangerous Links
Once you’ve identified the toxic links, it’s time to disavow them… To do that, you need to list all those links that you wish to disavow in a notepad, and save it as a .txt file.
You can upload this file in Google Webmaster Tools, and you’d see positive results over next 2-4 weeks.
Monitor the Results
Although this is an estimated time frame, you get to see good results within just 1 week in a few cases, while results may take more than even a month to show up on the other occasions.
If you don’t see any help even after couple of months, you need to check if you forgot to disavow any other toxic links, and even see if any new toxic links have been spotted recently.
So now that you know the importance of removing toxic links, keep monitoring the link profile of your website on a weekly basis, and take necessary actions to filter out those potentially dangerous links that can create a whole lot of havoc in future.
