Are you wondering why your ranking dropped? This might be because of unnatural links within your pages. These have a negative impact on your website’s performance. Google will also penalize you for having these kinds of links.
This affects your bottom line and the quality of your search results. Identifying these and removing them has instant positive effects. Experts on SEO services from Utah cite the following techniques that allow you to find unnatural links.
Use Tools
Tools will make your life easier; these allow you to identify unnatural links and know what to do with them. Expert use Ahrefs and SEMrush, just to name a couple, but there are others that can provide you with similar results. Some you have to pay for, while others are free with limitations.
Regular Backlink Audits
A backlink audit provides you with an overall picture of the health of your website. This shows how many links direct to your pages. Once you identify what these are, you will know which links have a negative effect on your site’s performance.
This also enables you to determine if you are doing well against your closest competitors.
Sort Backlinks
It is difficult to determine which links do the most harm on your websites. After you conduct an audit, sort through the backlinks to determine which ones have the most significant negative impact. Sort these according to a toxic score displayed by the tool you use. SEMrush provides you with decent results with numerical values.
Perform a Manual Review
After sorting the links, run a manual review. Check the websites linking to your pages and browse them. Once you identify a pattern, it will be easier to segregate the good links from the unnatural ones. Spammy content almost always follows a pattern, and this is something you should watch out for.
Create different lists to determine your course of action, such as disavowing or leave alone.
Upload the Disavow File
Now that you have a list of links to disavow, create a file. After doing so, uploading it to Google Search Console is your next step. This allows you to get better traffic and reduce the risk of incurring a penalty from Google.
Types of Unnatural Links
Knowing some types of unnatural linking enables you to identify and monitor them more effectively. Here are some examples:
- Link exchanges for boosting rank – this is a scheme that intends just to manipulate the algorithm and boost ranking. Some websites just put links on a list and link to pages unrelated to their content.
- Link schemes – this approach is one of the oldest tricks in the book. All it does is to link several websites a person or company owns to each other.
- Poor quality bookmarking websites and directories – some people create these types of sites and directories to pad their link profile and boost their ranking. These are spam and offer no real long-term value.
Identifying what unnatural links are and what to do with them allow you to stay ahead or go head-to-head with your competitors. It also improves user experience and boosts your online ranking.
