Over the past few years, SEO trends have changed drastically, but there is one thing that remains the same, and that is “the power of backlinks.”
We often believe that building backlinks for website drives traffic and boosts brand reputation. But, is it true? Certainly, the backlinks can help you achieve your traffic goals and get better rankings, but at times, they can lead to a state of vulnerability and penalties.
Having bad quality backlinks redirecting to your website can be the most dreadful experience you could ever have. Quality is an attribute which can decide the profit and loss of your website. Bad backlinks can ruin all your SEO techniques and marketing efforts, keeping you away from improving them and even leading to Google penalties.
We do understand that you need traffic on your website. But, it's not about traffic all the time, it’s more about the relevant traffic which helps you improve your brand reputation. “Online reputation” is a big term that depends on SEO and quality backlinks. Well, before we dig into the effects of bad backlinks in SEO, let’s know more about online reputation.
What is Online Reputation?
“Online reputation” is usually measured by the number of views a website has, its sales rate, lead generation, and customer retention. A favorable online reputation means customers trust your company and love to purchase from your website. While on the other hand, a critical online reputation will make customers distrust your company.
So, this is the basic fundamental of online reputation. Online marketers often say that reputation is something that matters at the end of the day. If you are running a business, then your reputation directly affects your sales. And we believe that it depends on the quality of backlinks quality as well. Right?
Unlike the traditional approaches, modern digital marketing techniques and SEO approaches are truly reshaping the brand reputation. These days, we have so many choices to monitor the bad backlinks to boost your online reputation. But first, we need to discover what is bad backlinks and what is the reason behind them.
What are Bad Backlinks in SEO?
Google has some strict guidelines for backlinks, and if you don’t follow them, it may lead to bad SEO. In simple words, a backlink is bad when it comes from:
- Low-quality directories or social bookmarking sites
- Websites that automatically generate backlinks
- A website penalized by Google
- Adult and gambling related sites
- Links with over-optimized anchor text
- Links with duplicate content, etc.
How to Manage or Monitor Your Backlinks?
Building backlinks is not that hard, but keeping an eye on the backlink quality is one of the most daunting tasks.
The traditional SEO approaches often focus on the backlink quantity, but now we are living in a highly competitive digital era where quality and relevance is more powerful than quantity.
So, it's good to monitor backlinks of your website and your competitors’ sites as well. In the traditional era, people often perform a manual backlink audit, which is time-consuming. Unlike the old school SEO, the new age has bundles of link analysis tools including:
- Ahrefs
- Majestic
- SEM Rush
- SEO Spyglass
- Monitor Backlinks
- Link Diagnosis
- SE Ranking
You can also try your hands on these backlink analysis tools to fetch the number of bad backlinks, its domain, and source.
Once you have retrieved the bad backlinks, then you have to jump on Google Search Console or Google Webmaster where you can disavow the backlinks to get rid of spammy links.
Also, you can report the website to Google's Webspam team. It will not allow you to remove that particular link, but it can help keep that page off the top Google results.
How to Earn Good Quality or Positive Backlinks?
Are you stuck with numerous bad quality backlinks? Don’t panic as you can get rid of them by using the Google Webmaster Tool. Also, you can make new and positive backlinks.
Begin with your competitors. Competitors’ Backlink Analysis is one of the most sophisticated and remarkable approaches to gain the quality domain where you can build your backlinks.
You have to perform a few Google searches by taking some important keywords of your website and watch out for the site with the highest ranking.
Go to the top referring sites and perform the backlink audit by using some reputed tools as discussed above. In this way, you will not only gain information about backlinks, but you can also learn about the type of domain, number of visits on your site, traffic sources, social traffic, etc.
Once you've identified competitors’ backlinks domain, work to replicate their links and drive similar traffic to your website.
Focus on Your Product & Services
Replicating the links is not enough to stand out in the digital landscape. Don’t forget that in the end, it's more about your products and services. Make sure you offer good quality of products and services, great links come from great product and services.
The backlinks reflect your brand reputation. Don’t think about acquiring backlinks for the sake of your SEO strategy, rather try to acquire it to achieve excellent outcomes.
Conclusion
So, don’t let your backlinks negatively impact your online reputation. Try your hands on these procedures and keep track of links. This is how you can regain your popularity and good quality backlinks, eventually improving your online reputation.
