Backlink cleanup

Removing toxic links which are causing a reduction in traffic

4.6* TrustPilot | 4.9* Google

Table of Contents

Why cleaning backlinks is essential

A backlink cleanup is a way of removing black hat and poor quality links from websites. A backlink cleanup can result in improving your search engine rankings, and is especially relevant if a Google manual penalty has been applied for link building practices.

Typically, it will result in disavowing links, or requesting that links are taken down from the website.

Where do poor quality links come from?

A backlink cleanup is needed when a site is impacted by toxic backlinks. But where do low quality links come from?

Spammy backlinks

A spammy backlink is often the result of a poor quality link building technique. Maybe there are paid links from PBNs or other places where you can get harmful backlinks. If these are combined with “money term” anchor text, they can be particular suspicious to Google.

Link directories

Too many links from link directories can cause Google to consider that you have an unnatural link profile, with all of your link placed rather than being from an editorial process.

Negative SEO

Some SEOs offer negative SEO services, where they will send hundreds or thousands of poor quality toxic links from all sorts of sites – often the kind you wouldn’t want your site associated with!

A link network

Link networks are sites where you create a group of sites which all link to each other. Google considers this to be a very spammy link building practice.

Cleaning up bad backlinks

A backlink analysis can identify bad backlinks and create a list of links that will help your SEO efforts. However, they still need to be removed or disavowed.

Removal or changing links

Google likes sites to attempt to clean up some of the backlinks they’ve had created using various link schemes.

For this, after the link audit there would be an attempt made to contact websites linking to you in an attempt to remove or turn them into nofollow links.

The google disavow tool

Once as many had been contacted as possible, the remaining harmful links would be removed using the disavow tool.

Frequently asked questions

If you’ve been impacted by a google penalty – particularly a manual penalty – then yes, a backlink cleanup to remove poor quality paid links, any links from a negative seo attack or excessive use of anchor text may trigger a removal of the penalty.
It depends on the size of the site, but it can be several weeks to several months for the entire backlink process to be completed.
Yes, sadly, you will have to lose some of your links. If the bad links are the powerful ones, you may end up with less traffic than you originally had. If you’d like to discuss link building too, let me know.