How to Find Toxic Backlinks?

In digital marketing, online reputation and search engine rankings are the front face of any business. Every SEO professional ensures to maintain a good ranking for better traffic.

However, while maintaining their search engine ranking, digital marketers sometimes forget to address one of the most crucial factors: toxic backlinks, which can cause them to fail to improve their rankings.

This blog will help you understand how to find toxic backlinks in various ways. But before that, we will learn what toxic backlinks are and how they can impact your website.

What are Toxic Backlinks?

Backlinks from unrelated, spammy, or low-quality websites can harm your SEO and are considered toxic backlinks. These links can result in fines or worse positions in search results since they frequently break Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Some typical forms of toxic backlinks consist of the following:

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  Links to irrelevant or unrelated websites
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  Links coming from domain authority-poor websites
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  Links to domains that are flagged or spammy
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  Links from websites that Google has penalized

If you cannot find toxic backlinks, it can ruin your SEO efforts and hinder your site’s ability to rank for relevant keywords.

Various Ways to Find Toxic Backlinks

To maintain your website’s best SEO, you must find toxic backlinks. Several efficient ways to find this lousy link-building include using SEO platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush and tools like Google Search Console.

In this section, we will learn about all these methods to find toxic backlinks and improve the website’s SEO performance.

Use Google Search Console

One of the easiest yet elegant ways to find toxic backlinks is to use Google Search Console. SEO professionals use this tool to check their website’s performance and health in Google search results.

Along with that, you will also get precise information on various kinds of backlinks and their quality. Here is the method by which you can find toxic backlinks using Google Search Console:

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  Log in to the Google Search Console and select “External Links” under the “Links” section on the left-hand menu.
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  Download the “Backlink Data” in CSV or Excel format to analyze all the backlinks to your website.
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  Analyze all the suspicious or spammy links listed to understand all the irrelevant or toxic backlinks and enhance your site’s performance.

Use SEO Tool to Conduct Site Audit

Another way to find toxic backlinks is to use various SEO tools, such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz, which will provide you with an analytical and detailed report of your website’s backlinks.

Here are some more exclusive ways that you can use to find toxic backlinks via comprehensive SEO tools:

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  Use SEO tools to get a detailed backlink overview, which includes various metrics such as domain authority, referring IP addresses, and trust flow.
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  Use tools such as Moz and Ahrefs to understand the “Domain Rating” factor, which determines the authority and trustworthiness of a referring link to your website.
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  Use SEO tools such as SEMrush to find a backlink’s domain authority and spam score and remove it from your website to prevent harm.

Check Domain Authority and Spam Score

Always check every website’s domain authority and spam score before looking for referral links. These two factors help you avoid harmful links and maintain your website’s health and performance on search engines.

Here is the method that you can use to check a website’s spam score and domain authority:

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  You can use tools such as Moz to check the website’s domain authority. This will help you understand more about the link and content quality and the website’s SEO health.
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  The spam score is an SEO factor you can calculate by understanding the website’s inbound links and practices. Using Moz, you can identify spammy and black hat SEO practices to improve the site’s performance.

Check Links from Penalized Websites

Google penalizes websites that publish irrelevant or unauthorized content, and taking links from these websites can harm your site’s performance and health.

Therefore, always check the following factors when you find toxic backlinks on your website that are deteriorating your website’s performance:

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  Track website traffic and analyze it using SEO tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. These tools will provide you with a detailed and comprehensive report on the linked domain.
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  With premium tools such as SEMrush, you can get indications about Google-penalized sites that you can stop in a timely manner to avoid unauthorized link-building on your website.

These are a few ways by which you can find toxic backlinks on your website. Through these practices, you can improve your website’s performance and maintain good domain authority for better search engine rankings.

Conclusion

SEO is a practice that enhances your business’s reputation and ranking on search engine result pages. Since link building is one of the crucial tasks of the digital marketing field, sometimes, it can harm it if you do not perform it accurately. Hence, to find toxic backlinks, you can perform these practices to improve the performance and health of your website without getting any Google penalty.