An important component of the search engine ranking algorithm is the inbound links that point to a website. The search engines use this link information as one factor to determine the authority of a website, and in turn where it should appear on the search engine results page. Good links from high quality, industry authority websites are going to convey that the linked to website is high quality by association and pass on some of that authority. Bad links on the other hand can really wreak havoc on a site, especially in recent years after the release of the Google Penguin update that targets websites that have lots of inbound links from low quality sites.
It is the responsibility of the website owner to keep an eye on their inbound link portfolio and take action if anything seems amiss. Unfortunately a website owner doesn’t have complete control over their inbound links given the nature of the web. Any website out there can link over to your website without your permission. Sometimes negative SEO is at play and competitors or spammers set out to sabotage your site by building lots of low quality links in a short period of time (a huge red flag to the search engines). In some cases website owners don’t do their research and make the mistake of outsourcing SEO link building efforts to black hat SEO firms that will also build these low quality links to try and beat the system and meet a certain quota of links per month. No matter how these bad links show up, website owners need to do their best to remove them once they appear, and hopefully before they do any permanent damage to the search engine authority of the website.
On a regular basis a website owner will need to conduct a manual link audit to determine the quality of the inbound links. You can pull a list of inbound links from your Google Webmaster Tools account. It’s also a good idea to get an additional list from a paid tool like Moz since each program pulls links in different ways and might give you a slightly different list of inbound links. You will then need to analyze the list of links. If you recognize a domain as “good”, if it’s a site that you’ve been actively guest blogging or blog commenting on for example, you can skip over those. It’s the ones that you don’t immediately recognize that you will need to manually visit and determine whether it’s a good link that occurred naturally or if it’s a link from a low quality site that could hurt you.
When you spot a link from a low quality site, you will need to try and get that link removed ASAP. To start, locate the contact information of the site owner and send an email stating that you’d like the link removed. Follow up if necessary. If you see a significant number of poor links, you can also create a disavow list and submit that to Google, essentially telling Google that you know those links are bad and don’t want Google to consider those links as a part of your link portfolio for SEO purposes.
Checking your inbound links certainly isn’t a fun part of SEO, but it needs to be done. If you don’t keep an eye on your inbound links they can get out of control and a search engine penalty can sneak up on you.
