My website was not a big performer in search engine rankings, but still it receives few thousands of search visits everyday. I was happy as long as my search kept growing few percentage every other day. All was fine, until Google webmaster and Alexa reported huge increase in my site backlinks. Yes, it was very huge – around 40k nofollow, unnatural and spammy backlinks pointing to my site and it didn’t stop there, it kept increasing daily. As a result, my search engine ranking gone worse. My website started receiving only few search visits and that kept decreasing drastically. The most painful thing is, I didn’t create those spammy backlinks to my site, because I know Google and other search engines doesn’t like sites that gain tons and tons of low quality backlinks. I was helpless, but I started asking few questions to myself. How did that happen? Who might have done that? and How I’m going to rescue the site?
What are unnatural backlinks and how it will affect your site?
First I tried to understand what Google says about the unnatural and low quality backlinks. The Google webmaster had a video explaining the issue quite clearly. Matt Cutts, the Google engineer speaks about the web search quality and the impact of unnatural backlinks.
So it’s clear that low quality backlinks are not going to do any good to site’s SEO. But how to identify and remove those? That’s quite challenging, sorry it’s really a challenging task.
Identify using Google Webmaster tool
The next step is to identify the number of backlinks coming to the site and then filtering out the bad ones. When I looked into webmaster tool it showed me total number of backlinks and the domain that gives me the highest number of backlinks.
Login Google Webmaster > Search Traffic > Links to Your site
Shockingly, there were 21k backlinks from a single domain and it didn’t stop there, each other domains were providing huge number of backlinks to the same article on my site. All those backlinks were nofollow and the domains were not relevant to my niche.
The Big mistake
One day, a stranger contacted me and was ready to pay $10 for reviewing his site that was offering discount coupons for a mobile case. I did reviewed the site and received the payment happily. After few weeks, I found that particular article alone had received so many backlinks and that’s where all the problem started. Soon after realizing the issue, I shooted a mail to the person who offered me $10 and asked whether he promoted the article using any spamming tool. He replied as “Yes, I did”.
How to remove low quality backlinks from the web?
Now the real challenge. According to Matt Cutts, there are few ways to remove the unnatural backlinks from the web.
- Contacting the website owners and asking them to remove your link.
- Using the Google webmaster’s Disavow tool
Alternatively, I found that making the article 404 will reduce the impact.
I did tried to contact few website owners and requested them to remove the links. I didn’t even receive a reply from anyone. But I can’t leave the issue as it is, because the site’s search traffic was performing poorly. The other option is to identify the domains that are linking and disavow using Google webmaster disavow tool.
How to disavow links using Google Webmaster Tool?
- Go to Google Webmaster’s Disavow Tool
- Prepare a list of domains in .TXT file. One domain per line as “domain:badlinkingdomain.com”
- Upload it to the Disavow tool.
Note: Google webmaster Disavow tool can understand only TXT file and strictly one domain per line in the text file.
This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site's performance in Google's search results. We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe that there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.
Disavow unnatural links and is that the end?
According to Matt Cutts, disavowing the links is not enough. It’s better to completely remove those bad backlinks from the web. But how?
Delete the post that received unnatural links
Finally, I deleted the post that was receiving too many unnatural links. But in coming days, Google webmaster is going to report 404 errors.
Did my traffic increase?
Not yet! I didn’t see any improvement for more than a week now. But I hope, these efforts might make Google penalties go away and the traffic might improve. I’m not sure whether the site will receive same amount of good traffic, because Google might still have those backlinks, but I still hope something good will return soon…fingers crossed!
