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Bad Backlinks Checker to Find & Hide Toxic Links with a Disavow File

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Get rid of spammy backlinks and improve your content ranking in Google!

Low-quality, spammy links put your rankings at risk of Google penalty. That is why toxic backlinks, whether they result from negative link building practices or your competitors' negative SEO, need to be instantly detected and neutralized.

The Anti-Penalty Link Audit feature in SEO SpyGlass automatically detects toxic links in your backlink profile and keeps your site rank safe from Google's link penalties.

The backlink checker has valuable features, including:
  • Google Penalty risk estimation
  • Free disavow file generator
  • Comprehensive analysis of live backlinks
  • Links import from Search Console & other sources
  • Scheduled backlink audits and alerts
  • Convenient export of data and reports

How the toxic backlink checker finds spam backlinks

With Google and other search engines getting ever stricter about what they consider suspicious links, a lot of controversy arises around link risks and how to handle them.

We've built this comprehensive toxic backlinks checker to help make sense of what's truly harmful to your site's backlink profile. The tool is set to analyze your links just the same as Google does. Our backlink analysis tool covers factors like:

  • Age of the linking domain
  • Its inbound and outbound links
  • Dofollow and nofollow link ratio
  • PageRank and domain authority
  • Anchor texts and keywords
  • Links from low-quality directories
  • Sitewide links
  • IP addresses and subnets
  • And more

How the checker calculates the Penalty Risk from toxic backlinks

In the past, SEOs used link-building schemes to artificially flow more link juice to their websites. Usually, these links came from low-quality directories, PBNs, and forum spam which did not add value for visitors. This made Google develop an algorithm that would penalize web pages for having such toxic backlinks.

To simplify SEO work with links, most spam checkers estimate penalty risk for backlinks. Our toxic backlink checker tool generates the Penalty Risk score for a site in general and for each link individually. The spam score takes into account such metrics as:

  • Several links are coming from the same IP or have the same C-class block.
  • The same keyword appears in more than 10% of your keyword text.
  • The linking page has too many outbound links.
  • The InLink Rank of the referring domain or page is pretty low.
  • The link seems to be from a link directory.

After the checker completes the scan, the percentage value of the Penalty Risk is calculated. The spam score shows the likelihood of the backlink causing a Google algorithm penalty. This metric points to all dangerous backlinks you need to immediately steer clear of.

Penalty Risk metric to estimate backlinks

A link with a 0 to 30% risk value is considered safe. A link in the 30 to 70% range is higher-quality but may potentially be harmful, so it's recommended that you take a closer look at it. A Penalty Risk of over 70% indicates lower-quality links and calls for urgent link detox action.

Today, search engines are smart enough to simply ignore link spam. Yet, having toxic backlinks in a profile may undermine the website's reputation and trust. Besides, you may get a manual penalty for bad linking practices. The affected website may get demoted or disappear from search results at all. That is why it is highly recommended to remove unnatural backlinks. And the spam link checker will help you do this ten times faster.

Step 1. Run the backlink analysis checker to overview your site

The domain authority checker analyzes the backlink profile in its whole complexity: domain authority and PageRank flow, inbound and outbound links, your top referring TLDs, most common backlink countries, whether too many links come from the same C-Class blocks / IPs, content is linked with diverse anchors, or anchors are optimized for the same keywords. The Summary dashboard helps you quickly determine if the website has a good backlink profile.

Audit your backlink profile

Step 2. Analyze your backlinks in detail

In the Backlinks submodule, you will find detailed backlink analytics: the upper dashboard shows general insights into the backlinks history, the link type ratio. Quick filters let you sort all backlinks by dofollow/nofollow type, differentiate between text links and image links, and find which websites are referring from their homepages. You can recheck backlinks altogether or each link separately. Just right-click on a linked page and see from which pages the backlink was generated.

Check your backlinks

Step 3. Find toxic backlinks in your site's backlink profile

The checker tool shows the backlink source page and your linked pages, their HTTP status codes, and the first/last found dates. The referral traffic stats powered from Google Analytics shows which backlinks are the most valuable for bringing relevant organic traffic. Pay attention to anchor text diversity: anchor texts overstuffed with exact-matching keywords is one of link spam indicators.

Inspect referring domains in-depth

Don't yet have SEO SpyGlass installed? Download the free backlink checker.

How to remove toxic backlinks affecting your site?

The link detox procedure goes in two simple steps: first, you contact webmasters of the referring websites asking them to take down the low-quality backlinks. If it fails, take step two and disavow the harmful links using the free disavow tool from Google.

1

Ask webmasters to remove the links

Contact webmasters and site owners of the referring domains, asking them to remove the link affecting your site. Copy the backlinks you'd like to remove to LinkAssistant — the tool will collect contact information for each of the referring websites and then help you manage email correspondence with webmasters via its in-built email client.

Contact webmasters asking to remove toxic backlinks

2

Submit the toxic backlinks report to Google Webmaster

It's also very probable that some webmasters will ignore your e-mails and the toxic backlinks will remain in their places. In this case, the best solution is to use the Google Disavow tool to tell the search engine it should ignore those links in your backlink profile.

What is a disavow file?

Toxic links can spoil your site's rank and authority (as in, the site might be demoted or removed from Google's listings completely) and thus require you to take action. Alas, taking down harmful links is not always possible — especially if you have a big number of spammy, low-quality backlinks. That's where Google Disavow Tool comes in — to report to the search engine that your ranking has suffered (or you expect it might suffer soon) from the toxic backlinks. The Disavow Tool is a way of telling Google not to take some specific links into account when ranking your site.

Use a Google Disavow Tool

Use a disavow file generator in SEO SpyGlass

Compiling disavow files manually is time-consuming and often challenging due to the files' peculiar syntax. SEO SpyGlass' in-app disavow file generator will take care of all that hassle and make creating, managing, and exporting disavow files a breeze. Here's how you can easily generate your disavow files using SEO SpyGlass.

1

Add toxic backlinks to the disavow list.

Select the toxic backlink in your SEO SpyGlass project (or a list of poor quality links filtered by the InLink Rank and Penalty Risk values, tags, etc.), right-click, and hit Disavow backlinks.

Generate a disavow file quickly

2

Disavow toxic backlinks by a URL or entire domain.

In the menu that pops up, choose whether you'd like to disavow only the backlink page or the whole linking domain. Pretty often, you'd want to disavow at the domain level, since there can be thousands of low-quality links coming from the same domain.

In the same view, you can add comments to the records you're disavowing. Comments are useful for your own future reference — whenever you review or edit your disavow list, you'll instantly see what kind of websites you were disavowing and why.

Adding backlinks you want to disavow

3

Follow-up backlinks overview.

After you've added all links you're about to disavow to the list, go to Preferences -> Disavow/Blacklist backlinks. At this stage, you can edit the comments, add or remove links from the list, and choose whether you're about to simply disavow the links, exclude them from all future updates you run in SEO SpyGlass, or blacklist the links completely (have them removed from your project).

Choose to disavow or to blacklist the backlinks

4

Export your disavow file.

Once you're done with completing your disavow list, hit the Export button, and select the folder to save the file so that you can upload it to Google Webmaster Tools.

Export the disavow file

5

Upload your disavow file to Google.

In the Google Disavow Tool, select your website and upload the disavow file you've just created. That's it — you've told Google which of your backlinks to ignore, and your site is all set to start clean! Note, it may take some time for the links to get disregarded by Google.

The benefits of the backlink checker tool:

  • With good backlinks, you ensure improved SEO rankings
  • Search engines discover and index your pages faster
  • You safeguard your site from Google's algorithm or manual penalties
  • You find reliable domains to build citation and partnerships
  • You strengthen Expertise, Authority, and Trust signals of your website

Try SEO SpyGlass' disavow file generator

Detect toxic backlinks automatically. Create, manage, and export disavow files in seconds.

Advanced features for Anti-Penalty Link Audit

Focus your effort on building backlinks from high-quality sources. The in-depth backlink analysis is helpful for SEOs looking to improve backlink profiles of their websites through meaningful link-building outreach. And our backlink analysis tool has a whale of features to make such work run smoothly.

Limit the number of links per linking domain

SEO SpyGlass lets you limit the number of links to find per linking domain. This comes in very handy when you know you've got numerous or sitewide links from certain sites — just set the links per domain limit to make sure you don't waste time on collecting data on each one of them. This option lets you save your precious time on link analysis!

This feature is also helpful when you're only interested in collecting a list of domains that link to your site rather than all backlink pages. For this case, set the links per domain limit to 1 — this will give you a nice list of linking sites that is easy to manage and navigate!

Limit the number of backlinks found per domain

Quickly analyze backlink profiles of your competitors

Switching to the Domain Strength module, you get the total score updated for your site's strength. The Domain Comparison module gives you quick insights into the backlink profiles of your SERP competitors (you can monitor up to 10 competitor websites with the Enterprise plan). The Link Intersection tool compares competitor link profiles for how much they intersect. Here you will quickly filter prospective domains where you can probably earn a few high-quality dofollow backlinks for your own website.

Domain Comparison to overview competitors

Bulk check of websites' authority and trust

For link-builders and outreach SEOs, the powerful Bulk Analysis feature in the backlink analysis tool checks up to two hundred domains at a time. Here, you can quickly filter out low-authority websites and leave only good ones to work with.

Bulk Analysis to find non-toxic domains

Switch preferred backlink source

You can configure the preferred backlink source when creating the project: choose SEO PowerSuite's backlink database (currently SEO PowerSuite Link Explorer is one of the most robust databases with over 2.7 million links). Or integrate Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You are free to change the preferred source as well in the run of the audit.

Choose a preferred backlink source

Check toxic backlinks regularly

Even when you've finished the clean-up and your site seems to have a healthy backlink profile — make sure to check it every once in a while. This way you're sure to safeguard your site from a negative SEO attack and spot any unnatural links before Google algorithm does.

Prevent spam attacks by running regular backlink checks

Schedule automated link audits

SEO SpyGlass lets you rebuild projects, update backlinks reports, publish reports, export all backlinks in CSV format and other data even when you are not at your desk. All you need to do is create tasks for jobs you would like to automate.

Schedule penalty risk checks as often as you need. Or you can sign up for email alerts to receive a warning in case some surge or decline in backlinks happens (which may be indicative of SEO attacks or technical issues).

Run regular automated backlink checks

Notice that the automation functionality of SEO SpyGlass backlink checker is available in advanced versions, you've got to upgrade to Professional License. The Professional and Enterprise editions extend the research to an unlimited number of backlinks (the free version allows analyzing up to 1100 backlinks), as well as saving projects and scheduling tasks.

Save hours on off-page SEO with the latest SEO SpyGlass

Easily check toxic backlinks & create disavow files