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How to Get Rid of Negative and Unwanted Backlinks

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First of all, you need to identify what are the negative backlinks pointing to your website. If you do not know how to handle this, you can seek out the help of a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert from an outsourcing or offshore staff leasing firm, or a part-time webmaster from freelance websites.

After checking for negative backlinks, you may also find links that are not really bad but you do not want them to be linking to your website because of their poor quality, it is okay to remove them too.

Removing negative and unwanted links can be very tricky but there is always a way.

Step 1. Remove Them Yourself

Some negative backlinks were done by bad SEOing, either by you or your SEO guy. For example, you have links coming from web directories which were good back then but now are link farms. If you still have your old usernames and passwords for those web directories, I suggest you login to them right now and remove your links from their website. It can be tedious but necessary to improve your website’s rank in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

You may find some SEO or IT outsourcing firms that offer this kind of service for a low cost, it can be cheaper from a freelancer in Odesk.com or from a staff leasing firm that offers short term project-based SEO services.

Step 2. Send a Friendly Email

When negative and unwanted backlinks gets a little harder to remove, try sending a request for removal by using their contact us form. In case they do not have a form, look for email addresses on their website, or try using GoDaddy WhoIs or DomainTools WhoIs and send them a friendly email.

Step 3. Use Google Disavow

The Google Disavow is a tool used by many webmasters to clean up hard to remove backlinks, but it is not always the first choice. The disavow tool can help you get rid of negative backlinks but it can also harm your website’s ranking if not used properly. If you are planning to hire a full-time SEO expert (or get one from your local outsourcing firm or an offshore staff leasing company) for this job, your guy should be knowledgeable in using this tool, else you will end up with more mess than getting those negative links off.

As the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, says in this video, “… you’ve done some bas SEO, you hired a bad SEO, they mess things up now you need to clean up. You’ve done as much work as you can to get those links off the web, but some people don’t respond or for whatever reason you can’t get every single link taken off the web. That’s the perfect use-case to do disavow…”

If no change happens after a few weeks of using the disavow tool, try sending a reconsideration request to Google but be warned, disavowing a backlink is not the first or best way to remove it from Google SERP, use it as a last resort only. But if your website is suffering from Negative SEO the disavow tool would be the best choice since the unnatural and negative backlinks will be ten folds and much harder to remove.

I still see the negative and unwanted backlinks pointing to my website. So what now?

Have patience, it will take time for search engines to have those links removed from their index. But if you still find yourself deep in the hole after doing everything that you can, maybe it is time for you to get help from the experts themselves. You may opt to hire your own full-time in-house SEO specialist or a part-timer from your local outsourcing firm, or hire the services of an offshore staff leasing company that specializes in SEO. If you do decide to outsource, consider a third party service provider that offers flexible solutions so it will fit in with your budget.

How to Identify Negative Backlinks

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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.

  1. Moz Open Site Explorer – It has a 30-day free trial for its Keywords Rank Checker.
  2.  Majestic Site Explorer – it’s free version is limited but otherwise a good backlink checker.
  3.  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.