SEO activities of every company involves building backlinks
and more the better. Since the Algorithm updates of Google have started the focus to create backlinks has
shifted to quality and people look at various metrics of a backlink before
creating them. There has been a
evolution on this front and multiple ways of creating backlinks as well as link
building services are available at a right price. A website owner or agency
keeps working on its objectives until the desired results of reaching the first
page of Google are achieved. During this exercise tons of backlinks are created
running into thousands, and BANG here comes a Google Algorithm Update which says that
one of the practices is foul in Link Building and your site drops in rankings.
You get a penalty and you are looking at lost traffic for a pretty long
time. Google says the road ahead is
simple, remove unnatural links to your site by either disavowing them using the
Google
Disavow Tool or get them removed.
Let’s get down to the question which is going to be asked a
lot of times down the road, What are Bad Backlinks?, Google does not provide a
clear definition of what bad backlinks are, but my guess is as follows
:
1.
Backlinks from Irrelevant
Sites
2.
Backlinks from Low Page
Authority Sites
Analyzing Bad Backlinks
There are a few ways from where a SEO Professional can start
weeding out the negative backlinks from a site affected by manual penalty or
rankings in Google. First step in the
process of finding bad backlinks is having all the backlinks in one excel
sheet. You can find out backlinks to your website through multiple sources. Since
Google Webmaster Tools does not show all the backlinks to a site. Though the
first step will to be consolidate all the available backlinks to your site.
Follow the steps mentioned below to gather all the backlinks in one excel
sheet.
Step 1: Go to Google Webmaster Tools and under the
Links to your Site option under Search Traffic, click on Links to your
site. Click on Download this table to
download all the domains linking to the site as shown below.
 |
| Backlinks Check |
Step 2: In this step we look at other tools to identify
the backlinks to the site. One such web tool is 99webtools.com which uses Moz
API to identify the backlinks to a site. Visit http://99webtools.com/banklink-with-pagerank.php
to download all the available backlinks to the site.
Step 3: Another free backlink checker tool available out
there is www.backlinkwatch.com , it
gives you access to over 1000 backlinks to your site.
Once you have the list of all the backlinks to the affected
site from the above steps, put them in one excel sheet/notepad. Quality of the
link can be checked with Page Authority and Domain Authority parameters
assigned by www.moz.com. While Domain
Authority here is a better parameter to judge it when compared to Page
Authority as Domain Authority is authority of the basic domain.
Domain Authority Check for Backlinks
To find out all the Domain Authority of all the backlinks in
one place, I suggest the free tool netpeak checker which you can download from
this link http://netpeak.net/software/netpeak-checker .
After Installation, untick the Index Domain and Index
Url from the left side as highlighted below to avoid captcha from Google
and temporary search band of your IP for hitting Google with too many search
queries. This is likely to happen if you enter even 100 backlinks. If Index
options are ticked this tool will send one query for every URL to Google to
find out the number of pages indexed in Google. This information is not useful
to us for finding bad backlinks.
 |
| Bad Backlinks Check |
Next Copy all the URL’s and click Load in Netpeak software.
Paste the URL’s into the box as shown below.
 |
| Backlink Analysis |
Click on Save and Click Start Check.
Once the check is complete, Export the results by clicking
Export at the top left of the page as shown below.
 |
| Backlink Analysis Report |
Once we have the Domain Authority of the sites, we can then
choose to set a benchmark of quality to find out bad backlinks. My parameter is
DA of less than 20, any site which has Domain Authroity of less than 20 is not
going to contribute much positive power to any site, thus I suggest to disavow such
link using Google Disavow Tool. Using the filters in Excel shortlist the sites with DA<20.
Another web tool which provides you an indication of poor
quality is www.openlinkprofiler.org
which provides you an indication of poor quality links to a site. After
entering the site in openlinkprofiler, click Link Disinfection as shown below.
 |
| Bad Backlinks |
It will provide you with a list of backlinks which pass on poor
power for SEO to your site. After consideration of DA in this case links can be
disavowed.
Consolidation of backlinks from all the available resources
and tools is an critical element in identifying low quality backlinks to your
site. Above process will get you started in identifying low quality keywords
and take appropriate action.
I hope this helps you to rank better and get great traffic
from search engines. As i write this article Google has announced that Panda 4.0 is going live and I am sure the focus on quality of backlinks rather quantity will amplify here once again.
