If you want to get rid of a Google penalty or you simply want to prevent one…
Learning how to remove bad backlinks is important.
There’s no other way around it.
You have to conduct a full backlink audit and find the low-quality backlinks.
While there are numerous link removal services, most of the time they are:
…so it’s better to do it yourself.
Finding low-quality backlinks can be a challenging task for some people, but it shouldn’t be that way.
By following the tips I’m about to share with you in this post, you’ll learn how to identify and remove all your website’s bad backlinks.
Once you know how to eliminate suspicious links, the Google penalty recovery process is very straight forward.
What Will I Learn?
You need to collect all your website’s backlinks from different sources, just to make sure you are not missing any of them.
Take a look at my case study to find the best backlink checker to learn more about that!
To get started, go to Google Webmaster Tools and export all your website’s backlinks.Click on ‘Search Traffic’ and then on ‘Links to Your Site’.
On the next page, click on ‘more’, from the module ‘Who links the most’. Then click on ‘Download more sample links’. Google will download all your website’s backlinks in a CSV format.
Another way to find backlinks to your website is to use Open Site Explorer from Moz. Enter your website URL and click on search and then request a CSV report.
You now have two backlink reports, one from Google Webmaster Tools, and one from Moz. Both of them have a list of backlinks, but none of them has any metrics to compare the links value.
You could also get more backlink information from Ahrefs & Majestic SEO.
If your website has only a few links, manually checking them would not be a problem. But if you have hundreds or thousands of backlinks, you must find a way to sort them by their importance.
To help you identify what links are good or bad, you will have to gather more information and SEO metrics.
To determine your backlinks value, you can use Monitor Backlinks. In this tool, you can import both CSV reports from GWT and Moz, and you’ll get more insights that will help you identify what links are worthy to keep.
As a side note, you can also connect your domain with Google Analytics with Monitor Backlinks, to find more links.
The tool uses Analytics Referrals and also Ahrefs API, so this will get you fully covered. You’ll have backlinks collected from the most trusted sources, so there’s no way you will miss a link.
Here’s how to import all backlinks reports to Monitor Backlinks.
Click on ‘Add new backlinks’.
Scroll down and click ‘Import now’. The tool automatically recognizes backlinks reports from GWT, Moz, Ahrefs or Majestic.
On the next page, you have to upload the CSV report exported from Moz or GWT and then choose how many links / domain you want to import. Monitor Backlinks automatically removes duplicate links.
If you later want to know the source of the links, you can tag them. For example, you can tag all links imported from Moz as “MOZ Backlinks”. Next, click ‘Upload & Import’ and in a few minutes you will see all your backlinks along with their SEO metrics on the backlinks page.
Repeat the process to import your links from all sources and then you can move to the next step, which is identifying low-quality backlinks.
When trying to remove bad backlinks, you usually have to check your backlinks one by one.
Nevertheless, if your website has too many backlinks, you will have to filter and sort them by their value. By doing so, you can save time and check only those that have very poor SEO metrics.
To remove bad backlinks, it is absolutely critical to identify websites with lower domain authority. You should do some other basic checks let searching for the website on Google to check it is indexed and not penalized by Google which should be removed.
Learn more about how to find bad backlins for removal below:
If a website is not indexed by Google, it means it was penalized and banned from the search results, or it’s a very new website and Google has not crawled it yet.
These are not the type of websites you want to link to your website. Either way, you have to check such links manually, and remove them if they are bad.
Find all your website’s backlinks coming from unindexed domains, by using Monitor Backlinks filters. Click on ‘Filters’ and then on “Domain and Page not indexed”.
When you find a backlink you want to remove, add a tag to your link by clicking on the settings icon on the right side of the backlink row. I usually tag such links with the word ‘remove’, so that I can easily find them later.
Next, you can check all websites coming from domains with PageRank 0. Google has not updated the PageRank toolbar for more than one year.
But this is the only SEO metric coming directly from Google, so we have to take full advantage of it.
Click on ‘PR’ and then choose to view only domains with PageRank 0.
After you are done analyzing and tagging backlinks coming from domains with no PageRank, you will have to filter your links by their Domain Authority.
This metric is coming from Moz, and it’s updated more often, so it should be more relevant and more accurate.
(Click here to learn how to increase Domain Authority).
Choose to view all backlinks from websites with a Domain Authority below 10 or 20 and analyze their quality.
It often happens that websites with too many outbound links are of low quality.
An example can be auto approved blog comments. Because of the lack of moderation, the quality of the backlinks is very low, especially if it’s abused by spammers.
To find all your backlinks coming from pages with too many external links, from Monitor Backlinks, click on ‘Filters’ and then on ‘EXT’.
This will show you all backlinks from sites that have over 100 external links.
It’s no secret that Google doesn’t like spammy blog networks. If your website has such links, you might want to remove them, especially if they are coming from sites using spun content.
Find backlinks from blog networks or from websites using the same hosting IP by checking the ‘IP’ column.
The number from the right side of the flag indicates how many backlinks your website has from that unique IP.
Another way to detect bad backlinks is to look at the TLD of the websites linking to your site.
Let’s say, for example, you have a local business selling online products in London. It would make no sense to have backlinks from websites located in India, Pakistan or Russia.
You can filter your links by their TLD using the search filters from Monitor Backlinks.
Relevancy is another important metric to consider when cleaning up your backlinks profile.
It’s critical to check if your website has backlinks from gambling / casino or adult sites.You can do so, by clicking on ‘from’ and typing keywords like adult, gambling, poker, etc.
Here’s an example of how I found two backlinks from adult websites I need to remove immediately:
After completing the identifying process and finished tagging all your bad backlinks, you have to remove as many as you can.
The removal process can be challenging and tricky. Most importantly, you have to understand that you can’t remove all backlinks.
However, you will be able to disavow all backlinks you can’t remove.
These are the key elements to consider when doing link removal:
It really helps if you use an outreach tool like BuzzStream that will save you so much time when trying to lookup contact details and contact site owners. It’s an amazing tool everyone should have in their arsenal.
So how does a correct link removal request looks like? Here’s an example:
As you can see, the outreach was very polite and gave me the exact details of where I can find the backlink I was asked to remove.
It was easy for me and didn’t take more than 1 minute to help him out.
To start cleaning your backlinks profile, head back to Monitor Backlinks and load all the low-quality links you have tagged in the first steps.
Next, take each backlink one by one and try to get in touch with the webmaster responsible for the website.
There are a few different ways you can find someone’s email address or contact page.
First you can use Matthew’s email address lookup guide or his free SEO Tool RankCracker which can look up emails and contact URLs
You can also use the amazing BuzzStream outreach tool which has too many awesome features to list. Search for contact details on their website. Most frequently, you can find a link to the contact or about page, on the header or footer of the website.
If you like doing things manually you can look on each backlinks contact page, try to identify who is the webmaster or who is responsible for the content of the website.
Once found the name of the person that can help you, try to find his email address. Most often, email addresses are built like this: name@website.com, firstname.lastname@website.com, initial.lastname@website.com.
Alternately you can use tools like Voilanorbert.com to find anyone’s email address. After inputting the webmaster name and website, VoilaNorbert will search for their email address.
If those tips fail, use Whois.net to find the email address associated with their hosting company.
Most of the time, you shouldn’t need to go that far, but if you are dealing with some very awful backlinks it’s worth spending more time removing them.
So now, let’s see how to disavow backlinks you can’t remove…
After sending your removal requests, give it a few weeks for the webmasters to reply and then send your follow up. Tools like BuzzStream will do that for you automatically.
If you still don’t get any reply, it’s time to disavow the backlinks you couldn’t remove.
To easily create a disavow report, you can again use Monitor Backlinks. First choose the backlinks you have tagged to remove and then click on ‘With selected’ – ‘Disavow domains’.
It will create a disavow report with all the backlinks that contain the ‘remove’ tag.
With the report, go to Google Disavow Tool and simply upload the file. Make sure to double check everything before submitting the disavow report.
Now you know how to remove bad backlinks to your website, you should be safe from link based penalties for the foreseeable future.
Always pay close attention to all your website’s backlinks and make sure you remove or disavow the bad ones with a regular backlink audit before it’s too late.
Grab your backlinks from as many sources as possible and filter your backlinks to identify those that are hurting your rankings.
Keeping a clean backlink profile is essential to successful SEO so make sure you are using reputable link building services in the first place.
How do you find bad backlinks? Have you ever dealt with a penalty? If you need help to detect bad backlinks & recover from a penalty click here.
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Hello Mathew, your on top of the game .thanks for sharing such sweet comment.
No problem, thanks very much
Thanks for such a helpful post! Most of your suggested tools were quite familiar to me. Only I haven’t tried Voilanorbert and used Snovio email finder and verifier instead. So will give it try too.
Hi Jordan, no problem, let me know how you get on
Thanks, it’s very helpful post for us.
Good to know
Really thank you so much man, now only I found out lots of spammy backlinks and remove it.Thanks for the great help and brief explanation.
No problem Anto
This is a great post. So clear and easy to follow. Thanks for the tangible and attainable help. All your hard work is much appreciated.
Thanks Jim, great feedback!
Someone tried to do negative backlinks on adult sites because of this when I typed my site in the Search engine I always find many adult sites. What I can do to recover it quickly?
Follow the steps in this post or https://www.searchlogistics.com/services/penalty-removal/
this is very informative post…thank u for sharing this post
No problem Himanshu!
Hi Matt How are you?Dear can you make a video for newbies? Because newbies can’t do this
Yes I will think about it
This is my second time in this helpful site.Really very very helpful post for bloggers.Thanks for sharing your knowledge. 🙂
No problem 🙂
One of my niche sites started losing its SERP ranking, I think it’s due to bad backlinks. I’m trying to follow this guide, and I hope to see better results soon! Thanks! This is really helpful… 😀
No problem Joe!
Thanks for awesome post !!! Finally i found how to disavow my bad back link. Thanks a lot bro !!!
No problem Masud
This is a great article, thanks. I’ve been wandering whatbwas the best way to find out what bavklibks May effect my domain rank and then how to disavow then. This post will be my guide for this weekend to start cleaning up my nacklinks
No problem Sean, glad to help 🙂
Right, thought so, i believe SEMRush is good but they give false information sometimes. Thanks Matthew. really appreciate this.
Ok but as long as the disavow file is in place in Google, what SEMRush reports is irrelevant
Hi Matthew, thanks for your quick response. so after the disavow using google webmaster tool. I use SEMRush to keep track of the backlinks which shows me the toxic backlinks are back again after few weeks. It’s very frustrating.
Hi guys, the problem i’m having after doing all that was said is that the bad backlinks kept coming back. even after i disavow them all, they appear again.
How do you mean ‘they appear’ again?
It is very helpful article. Keep continue!
No problem Raj
thank’s man you help me
No problem 🙂
hi this was a great article but i found it more difficult can i get some more easy way through i can get the same result?Regards
What did you find difficult?
One of the best article of my search… thanks alot.. finally found a helpful article on bad backlinks…
No problem Mukesh!
Really liked this one. This looks to be a really useful guide for someone who is looking at ways to remove bad links for their website. Well written and informative. Thanks!
No problem Pavitra
Excellent article. Bad backlinks are harmful to our blogs. We need to remove these backlinks. You have shared an excellent tool that helps us to remove bad backlinks.Thanks for sharing.
No problem Munna
Thanks for this complete article
No worrys Joy!
Verry Nice Article… I like ite
Thanks Munawan!
Hello Matt. What a good post it is. Many issues and tips to overcome it are already covered in a super informative post. Really love it and big thanks for sharing your great ideas.
No problem Hajar!
Hi there Matthew,In on of my clients website, I received a lot of backlinks from spammy sites, and they didn’t even exist so there’s couldn’t be anyway to contact them. The technique that you brought it here, it’s life saving, believe me.Cheers,Clay Smith.
How do you mean they didn’t exist?
Thanks Felix.I have a feeling this could be the issues with my site because I lost a few hundreds of daily visitors to my site when a site or two linked to mine. Since then, I’ve been trying to improve SEO, traffic, etc. I may have to do an audit to be doubly sure.Then, I can begin again.Thanks again!
Run your site through https://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ to help pin point the problem
Great and complete article with step by step guide to remove bad backlinks..Thank you for great posting and sharing
No problem Syam!
Nice share Matt, Thanks!Can I use scrapebox instead of Monitor Backlinks?
They are very very different tools
It seems good for me and need to follow the process defined here.
Glad to be of service Ashok!
It is a very strong and useful article, i just read it and got one question still: if a domain is deindexed, how this could affect me? It is not in index at all…something like bad neighborhood maybe? Thanks!
Is it a new domain you have acquired?
One of my website hit by penguin update with lots of spammy links and I am looking for some good information about remove the bad and spammy links and I think this is one of the good one. Thanks for sharing.
Sorry to hear that, I hope this post has helped you!
Great post, thanks for sharing. Next time when you need to find contact details, try out our free Chrome extension: http://www.Lusha.co Its super effective for finding private emails such as Gmail, Hotmail, etc
Great Detailed article with step by step guide to remove bad backlinks..Thank you for sharing
No problem Akash!
Nice post,This tutorial is going to save lots of time of mine to analyze the backlink profile of my client websites.Thanks for sharing!
Please come back and let us know how you get on!
Great share as always, Matthew, thanks!
Thanks =D
Hi Matthew do you offer a service where you will do the clean up for a fee?Regards Dan
Sure please see https://www.searchlogistics.com/ and we can take a closer look for you.
Great post as always!This raises a question for me. If we use a backlink builder like GSA search engine ranker, are we causing potential problems for web masters by leaving links on their sites that Google might judge to be unnatural?
Yes that is a risk
Ahhh yeah then its probably the links 😛
The alert in my console says unnatural links to your site. Unless Google means something else by thisI actually have a latest blog post on my own site that i’m using to document everything i’m doing to try and attack this. I even referenced your great blog post which i’m using as a guide.
matt thanks for the post. I actually got hit with a penalty with less than 40 links reported in gwt and less than 6 links reported in ahrefs. Think it’s important for people to know that the links reported from these services can be completely different. I disavowed most of the links and have asked for reconsideration. I’ve been rejected twice. I’m going to go one more time link by link and I may just have to disavow every single link , even the good ones, because google is unpredictable. I’ll probably end up writing a blog post of my own documenting my journey wether the outcome is good or bad ! I will try some tips above.
Wow sounds like a bit of a crazy one – are you sure its a backlink related penalty?
Thanks for this article! One of my niche sites got hit hard recently by a competitor with spam links. It was hurting the site big time and I’ve been trying to find a good article regarding this topic. I found a few but very hard to follw. This one did the trick. Cheers
Hope it does the trick for you!
Amazing Share, Worth to have all in one simple post.Thanks for the post. Saves my many hours work.
No problem Hanif!
Many thanks for this well written and properly guided article on such an important topic. I am a beginner on SEO and just completed my online course and joined a company. This tutorial is going to save lots of time of mine to analyze the backlink profile of my client websites.I really appreciate your knowledge and thanks for sharing the same.
Hi Felix, thanks for the article. However, is open site explorer a paid service? I can’t find the “request CSV” link that you’re talking about.Please help
Yes it is
Honestly, This is what i’ve long to see . Mostly Google is messing around with my links . . . There are few links on my blog i thought of removing from search queries. . And you have save me from a huge stress. Glad to be on your blog , matt
Glad to have you here John 🙂
Hi There,I have been following your site for a good time now, and have implemented a good few of your suggestions where possible. After reading this guide I was, for the first time ever, a little disappointing. The solutions given appear a little obvious and nothing new in comparison to previous suggestions. When I read the title of the post I was very excited to see your suggestions on cleaning up a backlink profile that was a bit fishy. However I feel that the topic was not covered to its fullest. For example:I would like to know the best way to do all of the above but without the use of a paid tool doing all the leg work.What are the best methods for spotting a legitimate like vs an illegitimate link if we were checking manually?Are there any other tools or “secret methodology” that we are all yet to realise?Until today I was yet to find a post on your site that made me think “Yeah I know how to do that” so I am sure you can understand the reasoning behind my slight disappointment.I am very excited to receive your reply.
Hi Matthew,While this might seem a bit basic/obvious to yourself there are many people that dont understand how do diagnose their link profiles and clean them up.I wouldn’t recommend anyone waste thier time by checking manually, it would take a solid 45 seconds per link and time is money! Especially if I can check thousands automatically while I’m doing something else. This is business, value your time.
Really helpful Felix! Thank you very much for the detailed tutorial 🙂
Hi Matt, thank you for this detailed guide. I hope I will not have to use it, but bookmarked for future use in case a penalty occurs 😉
You never know 🙂
Hey Matt, Can see you’re still on the go and doing wonders! It’s been long!Have been waiting for this long overdue tutorial, Thanks Matt!Well done and keep it up!
Glad you enjoyed it