SEO Tip for Law Firms: Clean Up Your Backlink Profile
By Clinton on May 2, 2023 in Link Building, Maps & Directories SEO
You may be aware that link building is an essential tool to building your website’s authority and ranking higher within Google’s algorithm. What many people are not aware of, however, is that the quality of your backlink profile greatly outweighs the importance of the quantity of links.
The common belief is “the more sites that link to mine, the better.” While this may be true in a general sense, one must be careful to take any opportunity that shows up, as some links may actually be harmful and cause your rankings to be penalized. Google is known for keeping their hand close to their chest when it comes to how their algorithm ranks sites, but even they will tell you that these types of links will lead to penalties.
What is a Toxic Backlink?
So what makes a backlink toxic? According to Google in their spam policies: “Any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered link spam. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.” This can include link exchanges, automated programs, links from low-quality directories, links from sites that exist solely to provide links, and more. If you have a blog on your website, it is likely that you have encountered these options before. Spam emails from someone claiming to have “a wide range of high domain websites” available to provide links for a price are all too common in the world of SEO. While it may be tempting to take up one of these offers, or to submit your business on a directory full of links, it is important to exercise caution and remember that it will likely only hurt you in the long run.
How to Remove Backlinks
It’s not difficult to recognize if a site is a good option when trying to build new links, but what about existing links to your site? It may seem counterintuitive, but removing and disavowing your toxic links will often give better results than simply finding more new links. This process involves auditing a list of all the backlinks to your site, and submitting them for removal. The backlink profile of your website can be found in many places, including Google Search Console, or tools such as SEMrush or ahrefs. From there, you can view what sites are linking to you, what pages they are linking to, and how the link is recognized. If your site has a large number of backlinks, those same tools offer a way to help you deduce the quality of the link. SEMrush, for example, provides a “toxicity score” for each link based on various metrics that Google is likely to penalize for.
From there, simply upload a list of the links you wish to remove to Google’s disavow tool, and it will invalidate them. Note that it may take a few weeks to see results from this process, as Google will have to re-crawl your site.
Let the Experts Take a Look
Managing and expanding your backlinks is one of the most important aspects of ranking highly on Google, but can be very time consuming. Our experts keep up to date with the latest tools and strategies to effectively build your website’s authority and can cleanup your backlink profile, as well as identify new high-quality link opportunities.
To learn more, reach out to us and schedule a free consultation today.
