What They Are & How to Find Them

What Are Toxic Backlinks?

Toxic backlinks (or bad backlinks) are incoming links that negatively affect your website’s visibility in search engine results pages or have the potential to. The term usually refers to links that violate Google’s link spam guidelines because they were placed on external sites for SEO purposes, rather than for users’ benefit.

Google analyzes your backlinks to determine how prominent and trustworthy your site is. This means that certain kinds of links from other sites can benefit your SEO.

To discourage manipulative link building, Google has various policies and systems in place. This means that links acquired through questionable practices are often ignored or “devalued.”

But a large volume of toxic backlinks can trigger a manual action (or Google penalty). Because it can suggest that your site has engaged in systematic spamming.

A penalty can lead to your site being suppressed in or removed from search results. Here’s Google’s stance on links intended to manipulate rankings:

Links obtained primarily for artificial manipulation of Search rankings are link spam. Our algorithms and manual actions aim to nullify these unnatural links at scale, and we will continue to improve our coverage.

You can quickly gauge your backlink profile’s health with the Toxicity Score metric in Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool.

9 Causes of Toxic Backlinks

Let’s explore nine practices that can generate toxic backlinks.

1. Paying for Links

You should never exchange...