Backlinks are the buzzword for building a solid online presence and ranking higher on a search engine’s result page. They are critical to SEO and increase the credibility of your site. They signal to Google and other search engines that another resource on the internet finds your content valuable to link it with their own. It is a vote of confidence from one site to another. Getting quality backlinks is very important as this tells that your website is relevant to other websites on the internet belonging to a particular field or niche. Utilizing backlinks properly is the key to forming the building blocks of SEO. Backlinks signal trust, but links from disreputable sites can damage your reputation. Seek high-quality sites relevant to your content. Avoid spam links; they confuse readers and jeopardize your rankings. Focus on earning links naturally over time.
Links from High Spam Score Site
Bad backlinks aren’t relevant to your content on the internet and are sourced from a high spam score site. They usually get built into the site without any editorial control. Bad links are spam links that don’t add any value to the reader and confuse them. It does not relate to their search queries and directs them to websites they are not interested in. To avoid this and provide quality content to their users, Google has started to weed out bad links and spam sites and penalize owners for having them. Search engines regularly update their algorithms which become savvier in weeding out spam links.
How Google Detects Backlinks from Spam Site?
From a search engine’s perspective, there are many factors that make a link bad. A few clues are noted here to help understand a bad or a toxic link.
If your website has many links, but they all originate from the same site, it will look suspicious to Google. Most of the time, these links will also be irrelevant to you. You need to build a good network with other relevant sites and earn links from them.
If all of your links are coming from a domain that is not trusted or caters high spam score, it raises a red flag to Google.
If many web pages on multiple sites link back to you from the exact anchor text, search engines might view it as a link-building scheme.
Source links play a crucial role in determining a bad link from a good link. Linking your site to an off-topic discussion forum will look pretty bad, and this strategy can backfire.
The page layout of the backlink does matter. Spam links usually have very minimal text and more HTML, making them poor quality and suspicious-looking.
Also read,
What Should Be the Backlink Strategy after the link Spam Update of Google?
Bad backlink types to watch out for
Spams are ads that aren’t relevant to your site or content. In some cases, links could tarnish the reputation of your site if they are from questionable sources. Keep a lookout for links from spam sites, especially in your discussion forums.
Link mill websites or link farms bring many backlinks to site owners to increase the rankings. Still, the problem is these links usually are not quality links, and Google has updated its algorithm so that it won’t be including websites with the most number of purchased links. Google considers them as link schemes and has started to exclude them in their search results.
Press releases can become a source of bad links if not utilized correctly. Google frowns upon press releases with backlinks that don’t add value and aren’t relevant to your website. So only include press releases that are in tune with your niche or industry. Avoid filling out web pages of press releases with link backs that are irrelevant to you.
Also read,
Should you build backlinks on your competitor’s links?
Impact of bad backlinks from Spam Sites
The impact of bad links from high spam sites can be far-reaching and profound. Google is a powerful search engine that actively keeps watching spam links and bad links. They strive to provide quality content to their users and are pretty strict about their guidelines for spam links.
Many search engines, along with Google, have started to penalize website owners and bloggers for bad links. If this happens, not only will you rank very low, the chances of finding your article or post will decrease drastically even if you have high-quality content. In the worst case, Google could remove from the search index altogether.
Google has widened its net to include bad links from multiple languages and a spam team that initiates more than 400,000 manual actions a month.
Google review team penalizes you based on:
- A report from your competitor
- You are active in a niche that Google monitors constantly
- A manual review is triggered due to something in your link profile
- The algorithmic activity of Google initiates a manual review.
All this will decrease your ranking, popularity, and traffic directed to your website, which will directly hit your conversions. Getting penalized by Google is severe and very difficult to recover. Having bad links also might hurt your reputation as a trusted source or website.
So, coming back to the topic ‘Can giving a backlink to a high spam score site do damage to the backlink giving site?’ can be concluded as yes it is possible. If you are a website owner or a blogger who wants to stay in the internet community for a long time, building links in the right way is the way to go. Using shortcuts like a backlink to a high spam score site might be beneficial in the short run, and Google might overlook it, but in the long run, Google will notice and penalize you. It is tough to recover from the penalty Google levies on you.
There are two types of penalties that Google levies. Manual penalty and algorithmic penalty. A manual penalty is levied on your website when an employee of Google from the spam team manually reviews your website and finds it has spam and unnatural links. They might impose penalties that last around 30 days for minor transgression and for a long time for a more severe offense. The algorithmic penalty is when your website is penalized by Google’s algorithm, which is more severe than the manual penalty. Your website will be immediately hit, and a persistent negative trend will dominate search results. You can challenge the manual penalty and take the necessary actions to comply with the webmaster guidelines, but it is nearly impossible to recover from the algorithmic penalty.
Also, the huge number of backlinks on your site originating from a high spam score right will tarnish your reputation. If you are producing quality content in your niche and want to attract more readers to your blog or website, having links from a spam site makes you untrustworthy and shifty, decreasing the traffic to your website. It also confuses the readers as it is not something they expected and is certainly not related to their search. It also hits your brand value and profitability. So, the damage impacts you on many levels.
Even if you are producing quality content, when you indulge in such practices that try to hoodwink search engines’ algorithms, you are putting your website or blog at risk. Your quality content gets overlooked, and you start to rank lower in the search results. It gets challenging and expensive to remove the bad links from your website over time.
The type of backlinks you build is necessary and cannot be achieved overnight. It will help if you focus on building quality backlinks over quantity. Google also condones quality over quantity. Quality backlinks are gradually built over time. To effectively communicate and market your material, your backlinks should grow organically and not be spammy.
You should be careful of the backlinks you have received and constantly audit them. Disavow any links that aren’t relevant to your content, especially if they are coming from a high score spam site. Don’t allow trivial things like bad links to tarnish your reputation and hamper your progress on the internet community.
