Out of all search engines, the most dominant is Google, with an astounding 92% of the market share as of 2021. As such, it’s the perfect opportunity for online businesses to rank high, boost conversion rates, and build a stable reputation.
For that to happen, business owners and bloggers must implement good SEO practices and avoid those that threaten their reputation - such as spammy links.
There are a few ways you can protect yourself from these links, and one of them is by using a spammy link checker. Stick with us and learn about link spam and how to eliminate it on time.
Spam links look just like any regular link, but they can harm the search engine optimization of your website. Spammy links are easy to spot once you know what to look for.
The links you should be wary of are the ones that lead to spam sites or even sites with low domain ratings. The sites can be irrelevant to your particular website, they can contain little to no content, plagiarized content, and in the worst cases, malware.
It might not seem like that big of a deal, but search engines, especially Google, pay close attention to the content quality of the websites displayed. So, when it registers that a particular website contains link spam, it has two courses of action.
Once the algorithm flags a potential bad backlink on a website, it sends it to the Google webspam team for inspection. If a team representative finds that the link is indeed spam during the review, you will be informed that you’ve been given a manual penalty.
On occasion, you’ll get lucky and simply receive a warning to remove the bad link before you’re penalized. However, you should note that a review can be triggered by a random choice and not the existence of spam links.
Because Google’s algorithm is designed to spot bad links on its own, it can react and penalize your website without the help of the webspam team. The algorithm penalty is worse than the manual penalty in two ways. First, you won’t receive a notification that you’ve been penalized or why.
The second aspect, which is worse, is that you will notice that you’ve been penalized when your website experiences a sharp drop in traffic. The algorithm might even de-index your website completely.
The best defense against bad links is negative SEO protection. SEO services exist exactly for that reason - to develop, optimize, and protect your website. You can also use a backlink checker. Insert the link, and the tool will do the work for you. If the link has a domain rating lower than 50, it’s a spammy link.
To ensure that the link is legit, you can also check the uniqueness of the content. Simply copy the content of the suspicious site, paste it into Google, and analyze the sites with duplicate content. You can also use a plagiarism tool for this.
You work hard on your website, and you shouldn’t have to worry about the search engine optimization aspect of it. To relax and not worry about your website getting penalized or even de-indexed, turn to our experienced professionals at SEO Defend.
Contact us now and let us protect your website from spammy links!