How to Identify Negative Backlinks
If we want to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), we optimize our website and build backlinks to raise popularity and authority. Some seek the assistance from staff leasing companies or hire freelancers while other website owners do it themselves.
Outsourcing the task of identifying negative backlinks can be a great help if you have the budget, but if you do not, get ready because you will need a lot of reading, testing and tons of patience.
How to Identify Negative Backlinks
If outsourcing a freelancer or hiring a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert from a staff leasing firm will be your method of doing this, I suggest you get someone who is knowledgeable in search engine rankings, not just someone who can submit your domain to free sites.
But if you do plan on handling this task by yourself, here are some great free online backlinks checker you can use.
- Moz Open Site Explorer – It has a 30-day free trial for its Keywords Rank Checker.
- Majestic Site Explorer – it’s free version is limited but otherwise a good backlink checker.
- Backlink Watch – it’s free, but you will have to tolerate the ads.
Other than the above online SEO tools, you can also manually check your backlinks in Google, Yahoo and Bing by simply typing “link:http://www.YourDomain.com” on their search bars. Try it!
To identify what are the negative backlinks, simply look into relevancy of the URLs linking to your domain. Sometimes you can spot the niche of the websites linking to yours just by looking at their domain names. Any link that may look suspicious to you, investigate it! Any link that can potential harm your website is a negative backlink.
Quality backlinks help your website and its inner pages rank higher in SERPs, and in SEO, the more relevant a backlink is to your website the better, of course the content of the linking website has to be good too. Ask any SEO outsourcing firm, whether local or offshore staff leasing, they will tell you that quality backlinks is the best combination for quality web content.
I Have Identified My Negative Backlinks. What to Do Now?
The next step to do after identifying all negative backlinks is to remove them. Google has an online tool you can use and there are also manual ways of getting rid of those links; talk to the webmaster of the site or remove them yourself if you believe you’re the one who placed it there on the first place, like in free directory sites, social bookmarking sites, free ads you posted, etc.
Read now >> How to Get Rid of Negative and Unwanted Backlinks.
