How to Check Which Links Can Harm Your Site's Rankings

 Since past few months, Google is seen penalizing the site over search engine results, which use unnatural links along with the over optimized sites. Google was seen sending message to such sites asking them remove these links and then submit their sites for including the search index. It is really difficult to check such damaging links and hence it makes you the victim whenever your link profile turn out to be unnatural to Google. At times, even the bigger sites are seen becoming victim of the same, as they fail to check the harmful links found in their web pages. Nevertheless, there are many actions, which you could carry out at your end to judge your backlink profile of your site. The presence of low quality links over your website could hurt you, hence it is always recommended to collect as much of details as you can to analyze the added backlinks. The following are some of the ways to check which links could prove harmful for ranking your website. Let’s check them out:

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The Backlinks Risk Assessment 

In order to get rid of the harmful links that hampers your website’s rankings, you are supposed to collect as much data as possible from your site then only you would be able to assess the backlinks. If your site is small, you could carry out the assessment work manually since it’s pretty easy to collect the backlinks data and analyze them. However, for bigger websites wherein you have thousands of backlinks, it is difficult to carry out this task manually. You have several tools to carry out this task. To get away from the harmful links, you need different types of data, which is further discussed in the following paragraphs.

Collect all the linking root domains 

To identify the linking root domains, your basic requirement is to collect as much data as possible since by depending on only one kind of data cannot be called as an ideal thing. Combining the data from different web master tools, Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO tool could give you sufficient amount of data. However, if your website has been on the web since past so many years, make sure you collect as much data as possible from other sources as well instead of relying only on the above named tools. This is because, you have thousands of backlinks over your site and relying only on few sources may not give you comprehensive data. Make sure you remove the backlinks, which are of the same linking root domain and retain all the unique linking root domains at your site. Lastly, also remove the non found linking root domains (404).

Check the PageRank distribution 

Once you identify the unique linking root domains, your next step is to scrap the ToolBar PageRank for each and every of these domains. Ideally, this action is carried out only over the root domains, which are seen linking over your site. The ones, which are not linking should be removed if they are not very much complex. Then by employing a pivot chat in your Excel sheet, you could further refine the current PageRank distribution if required. The spike at the lowers ends with values as zeros and the non applicable ones should be considered as a negative indication.

Check all the deindexed root domains 

Your next step is to work over the linking root domains percentage that is not indexed in the search engines. If you see some positive TBPR value to some of the non indexed linking root domains then these could be the recent ones over the search engine, which you need to remove them.

Check the social metrics distribution 

This is an optional step; however, it could benefit you to some extent. Adding the social metrics (Tweets, Facebook likes and +1s) of all your identified linking root domains could prove beneficial in some specific cases. The idea here is to get rid of the low quality sites that carry a very less amount of social mentions, which users simply find them useless. The linking root domains having no or low social mentions often would point to substandard quality domains.

Check from time to time 

Make sure you carry out the above steps on a regular basis (monthly or weekly). This will help you a lot in indentifying the negative trend of the linking root domains. If you see the deindexation rates and PageRank distribution going down, it will soon going to hamper the ranking over Google thus reducing the traffic over your site. However, if you carry out these steps on fixed interval, you can get rid of the harmful links and retain your high ranks over search engines.

Final word

Whether you have a new or an old site, you need a lot of efforts to keep your rankings intact over the search engines. Apart from carrying out regular site work, it is also important to analyze the backlinks, which are harmful to your rankings and get rid of these. By doing so, you will help your site to dominate your sites in the search results.

About The Author:

Margaret is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, traveling and reading books. She contributes in SEO Morpheus(dot)com

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