Can you have too many backlinks?
The recent trend in 2019 for SEO seems to be adding backlinks to websites to boost SEO, but can you have too many backlinks?
Clients that have made the mistake of hiring some dodgy SEO company to buy bad backlinks for their website are risking losing almost all of their rankings.
These dodgy SEO companies end up buying bad links which might give you short-term wins, but it will backfire in the end, because you will be penalised by Google Penguin. Non-genuine backlinks indicate that your website might not have quality content to be impressive enough to get backlinks on its own.
How do you find bad backlinks?
The difference between good and bad backlinks is the condition of the website they are in. Sometimes a bad backlink is easy to find, but other times you do have to check the website yourself to see if and why the backlink has a negative impact on your website.
There are a couple of categories.
Backlinks from a website that has just been created for SEO links
If you come across a website has heaps of articles that lack consistency, chances are the website has just been set up for the sole purpose of linking other websites. If it is a WordPress site then it will probably be a default WordPress themes like TwentyEleven. These websites are usually not linked from other websites or are part of an odd link network designed just to link these lousy websites.
Backlinks that have over-optimised anchor texts
Most backlinks to a website are linked using the website name as the anchor text, this is the link text. Sometimes the URL itself is also used. If your website has a large number of websites linking to your page using those exact keywords, this can look very dodgy.
Backlinks within duplicate texts
Websites that are just set up for backlinks have content that just doesn’t relate or make sense, or is scraped from a related website. Some dodgy SEO companies create websites per subject, just to make it look like the links are on a related website. Google Panda will usually hit sites like this at one point, which results in low-quality backlinks for your site. Duplicate content is always a sign of low quality content in most instances, and that is what the Google Panda is for.
Clean up your site!
Your website could be suffering from negative SEO or you have made the mistake of buying bad backlinks from those dodgy SEO company in the past. To clean up your backlinks can be quite a task, as we explained above.
Let’s go ahead and give your website a good clean-out. We can’t wait to start spring cleaning your website! Contact DesignLab here.