How important is it to remove spam links from the site?

Spam links, which are considered as bad and malicious links, have a great impact on reducing site rankings and SEO. One of the most important factors that Google is very important for ranking the site and determining its ranking is the quality of the site backlinks. In this article, we want to become more familiar with spam links and teach you how to remove them.

With the introduction of the Penguin algorithm in 2012, malicious links and so-called spam were removed for the first time, and then, with the increasing importance of the Panda algorithm, changes were made to the site ranking again. Based on research and studies on the ranking of sites and the number of site links, it seems that the removal of these malicious and bad backlinks has a great impact on increasing the site’s ranking and quality. Links can have a huge impact on increasing or decreasing a site’s ranking and improving keyword rankings, and spam links are among the things that have a negative impact on a site’s ranking.

Impact of purchased backlinks on site ranking

Over the last few years, Google search engine has focused on websites that use spam backlinks and buy them to increase site ranking and more competition. In the past, people with sufficient budgets could easily order several thousand links for a fee, if these links did not exist at all and the user was not directed to any page by clicking on them. This was bad news for search engines, especially Google, because despite these malicious links, Google could not display high quality sites to users. Google has developed a way to increase the quality of search results, using it to identify quality websites that are created through legal methods and in accordance with Google principles. In return, fine these quality sites that have low quality links and spam in order to filter such low quality links.

First of all, to better understand spam links and their importance, it is necessary to get acquainted with the basic concepts.

What is a backlink?

One of the most important factors in determining the quality of a backlink is the quality of the website from which a link came and linked to your site. Dangerous links can be identified by the following methods:

• Link Farm: (Link Farm): Links originating from websites whose sole purpose is SEO and improving the site from the point of view of Google search engine; These types of links are called  link farms.
• Some sites allow everyone to access site content. Such sites contain articles that have no connection or coordination with each other, but are set up to link to other sites. These sites and such link building are also called link farms.
• Poor sites with low domain authority and a collection of poor links and poor and repetitive content.
• When many links from other countries enter the site.
• You have many backlinks, all of which came to your site from one site. (Especially if the site that linked to you is of low quality.)
• In a short time, a large number of links have entered the site. (This means that these links have been purchased.)

Google identifies all good and bad links through their unnaturalness and falsity.

How to identify spam links?

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, in the past many websites were identified and penalized for buying spam links or black hat SEO. Even if you do not use these malicious methods yourself, websites that are spam may link to your site without your knowledge. In addition, some people get negative SEO, which Google may consider abnormal links.

The first reason why you are penalized for spam links is to significantly reduce your site ranking. If the site rank decreases, you can check all the links that enter the site through the following method.

• Enter search Google console (Google Search Console)
• Select the search traffic option via the dashboard option and then click on the Links to your site section.
• In the left part, click on the Who links The most option and then on the more option.
• Finally, click on the download latest links option to see all the links that your site has entered and that Google is aware of.
• Check the links one by one to find out the quality of each site that links to you.

Recognizing some low quality sites is very easy and takes a little time. But in contrast, it is difficult to recognize some poor quality sites. One way you can identify a poor quality site is by paying attention to the site URL. URLs of sites that use numbers, capital letters, meaningless and irrelevant URLs, foreign websites, websites that have linked to your site several times; They are usually considered as low quality sites.

At the end of the link, list the sites that you are sure of, by linking to them, your site’s ranking will decrease.

How to remove spam links

In some cases, the number of sites that have sent spam links to your site may be high, which is practically time consuming to remove these sites. In such cases, some people believe that all spam sites and links can be removed through specialized and online software. If the best way to delete these links is to delete the sites manually using the following method:

One of the easiest ways is to contact the webmaster who gave these malicious and spam links to the site and ask him to remove these links one by one from the site. You can do this by sending a friendly email to remove spam links.

Another way is to manually delete these links yourself. In such cases, the first step is to notify Google of the existence of these spam links and ask it not to include such sites in its algorithmic calculations. To do this, first create a text file in Google DOCS and then copy the file through the .txt file that has been embedded with ASCII UTF-8 or BIT-7.

To make sure all of these links are removed from both the domain and the URL, add the Domain next to the names of all the domains. Be careful in the following way.

• First go to Google s Disavow tool page.
• Choose your website.
• Click on the disavow link option.
• Then upload the text file that you have prepared and the website links in it, in this section.
• Next, Google will tell you that “This is an advanced feature and should be used with caution.” If you are sure of the spam links you have selected, select the submit option.

Concluding remarks

Deleting spam links can be time consuming and tedious, but it is important to remove these links to increase the site ranking. After reviewing the site and crawling them by Google bots is a time consuming process that you have to be patient to get re-ranking.