How to detect harmful backlinks in SEO?

To summarize SEO, that is, search engine optimization, we can say that the pages on the websites are optimized according to search engine algorithms. These optimization processes are divided into three in SEO. These areas are on-page (on-site) SEO, technical SEO and off-page (off-page) SEO. In this content, we will explain the concept of backlink, which is one of the most important structures of off-site SEO, the types of harmful backlinks and how we can detect these harmful backlinks.

What is a backlink?

Backlink, in its simplest terms, can be defined as a link from another website to a page on your site. Search engines, especially in the first years, considered that the website was an authoritative source in its field, the more reference links were given to a website from different sources, and they gave priority to these sites in the search results page.

What is a harmful backlink?

Today, many website owners can purchase paid backlink packages in order to accelerate the backlink buying process, which should ideally occur organically. Thanks to these packages, they try to improve their SEO performance by buying backlinks from hundreds of relevant or irrelevant websites. However, some quality backlinks can have a positive impact on your site, while others can negatively affect your site performance.

Harmful types of backlinks

• Backlinks from adult content sites
• Links from websites with spam or duplicate content
• Backlinks by commenting
• Links from low-authority index

How to detect harmful backlinks?

Detecting harmful backlinks and then rejecting these backlinks with the Google Disavow Tool will ensure that your site is protected from performance drops caused by these poor quality and spammy backlinks.

Ways to detect harmful backlinks

• There are many tools you can use to improve your site’s SEO performance. The most well-known and frequently used ones are SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz. Especially if there are many backlinks given to your site, you can use these tools to detect backlinks to your site and filter harmful backlinks according to the quality score provided by these tools.
• In addition to these tools, you can examine inbound links to your site by using the Search Console tool that Google provides free of charge to site owners.

How to block harmful backlinks?

After detecting harmful backlinks, you should decide whether to block these backlinks on a URL or domain basis. Generally, the domains from which harmful backlinks come from are also spam, so it would be better to block backlinks on a domain basis. After listing the detected malicious backlinks in a txt file in the form of domain:example.com, you can log in to the Google Disavow Tool from the Search Console account to which your site belongs and upload your txt file to this tool and block harmful backlinks from your site in this way.