Learn how to maintain your domain reputation using Google and Bing’s disavow tools. Search engines work on a simple principle: to provide the most relevant and high-quality web pages to a user’s query. Search engines evaluate website content to determine relevance and quality. They use a variety of signals to do this, and one of the most important signals is backlinks.

Backlinks (inbound links to your webpage from other sources) are like a sign of trust from other websites. Internal links (links from one part of your website to another) are sometimes called backlinks, but backlinks are usually links from external sites. Backlinks from high-quality sites are generally good. These backlinks help optimize your website for search engines. However, backlinks from spam sites or backlink profiles that seem to be trying to game the system can be detrimental to your website’s SEO and credibility.

What is a backlink?

Backlinks are links from other sites to your site. Internal links are sometimes called backlinks, but backlinks generally refer to links from external websites. Backlinks from external websites can improve your site’s domain authority and search engine rankings.

The reason backlinks are important is because they serve as a reference from one webpage to another, ensuring that the linked site is relevant and worth reading. This can affect your site’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) depending on how many and how high quality the links are from external sources.

When SEO experts refer to a “backlink profile,” they mean the entire set of backlinks to all pages on your site’s entire domain (i.e., your website). For example, Shopify’s backlink profile includes backlinks to this page, Shopify’s homepage, its About page, and every other active page on your domain. (However, the links in the previous sentence are not considered backlinks because they link from Shopify pages to Shopify pages.)

Backlinks can be generated from anywhere on the web, but search engines generally ignore sources such as social media platforms, search engine results, and forums when evaluating backlink profiles. These types of backlinks are excluded from evaluation because they do not reflect genuine recommendations from the actual website owner, due to the nature of user-generated content on social media and forums, and algorithm-generated content in search engine results.

What are low quality backlinks?

Search engines evaluate the quality of a site by reviewing its backlink profile. Any backlink that gives the search engine the impression that the site is not trustworthy may be considered a bad backlink.

Bad backlinks are like getting a recommendation from someone with a bad reputation. On the web, these backlinks are usually low-quality, spammy, or irrelevant sources. For example, link farms, low-authority websites, and links from sites with irrelevant content.

It is important to note that your understanding of "untrustworthy" may differ from that of search engines. Search engines evaluate quality and trustworthiness separately, and their subjective assessment of a site's quality or trustworthiness may differ from Google's assessment. Also, just because something is poorly written or has an annoying amount of ads doesn't mean it is untrustworthy. Search engines use more complex algorithms to evaluate trustworthiness and quality, and their subjective judgments may differ from those of users.

Types of Low Quality Backlinks

Suspicious backlinks typically come from the following types of sites. Consider these possibilities when checking if a domain is untrustworthy:

Sites from Content Farms

If a site’s content appears to be written explicitly for search engines rather than human users, the site is likely unreliable. Significant user experience (UX) issues, such as sentences that don’t make sense, overlapping page elements, or mixed content on a variety of unrelated topics are hallmarks of a content farm.

Sites that sell backlinks

If a site seems to be trying to attract marketers or site owners by offering backlinks to their site—especially if it focuses on SEO or makes outrageous claims—it’s probably not legitimate. For example, the URL might be something like “get-free-backlinks-now.com” or the link text might say something like “#1 on Google tomorrow—Get your free sample link!”

How to Review Backlink Profiles for Untrusted Domains

There are several ways to check for untrustworthy domains by reviewing their backlink profiles:

Google Search Console

Google Search Console provides a free, simple report of your most important backlinks in the “Links” section. This is a great starting point for understanding your backlink profile, but it often misses links or doesn’t tell you how beneficial or harmful your links are.

Google Analytics Referral Traffic Report

The Google Analytics Referral Traffic report shows you all the backlinks that are driving traffic to your site, which can help you understand whether your backlinks are driving more visitors. However, it is limited to links that are driving traffic, and may miss backlinks that people don’t click on (which are still good for SEO). It also doesn’t provide additional backlink analytics, such as the relative authority of your backlinks.

Third-Party SEO Tools

Third-party SEO tools provide a more comprehensive backlink profile review. The analysis of these tools is unique, and Google has stated that they do not use the same methods that these platforms use. Some of the most popular tools today are Moz , Ahrefs , and Semrush . Semrush provides a “toxicity score” for each backlink, which determines whether or not a bad link could be damaging to your profile.

When should you reject a backlink?

Compared to a few years ago, bad links are now less of an SEO issue. Google’s algorithm recognizes that bad backlinks are often out of a site’s control, and has reduced the penalties they impose on sites for such links. So don’t panic if you find that your website has bad backlinks. In most cases, bad backlinks won’t do much to your performance, and good backlinks will have a more positive impact.

However, you may consider disavowing a backlink in the following situations:

If the site has been subject to manual action

If Google suspects that your site is engaging in black hat SEO practices, such as building spammy backlinks, it can issue a direct penalty to your site, called a manual action. (Manual actions related to links are called manual link penalties.) Manual actions immediately affect your search rankings, and therefore your traffic. If you have your site registered with Google Search Console, you will be notified by email when a manual action is taken (you will also see it in the Manual Actions tab in Google Search Console). If this happens to you, you should consider disavowing the bad backlinks as part of your troubleshooting efforts.

If you are sure that someone has done black hat or negative SEO on your site.

If you take over a site from a previous owner and find that they have been doing black hat SEO like pay-per-link campaigns, private blog networks (PBNs), or comment spam, review the backlinks they have created and disavow the bad links. You should also consider this if you suspect someone is using negative SEO tactics like buying bad backlinks to lower your site’s rankings.

How to disavow backlinks to your website

A backlink disavow is a signal to search engines that a particular link is negatively affecting your website. Here’s how to disavow backlinks on Google, which has 92% of the global search engine market share, and Bing, which has about 3%.

Disavowing backlinks from Google

To disavow a backlink from Google, follow these steps:

1. Create a list of URLs to reject. The file must be in .txt format, with one URL per line. For example:

http://examplespamsite.com/sketchy-link

http://examplespamsite.com/paid-links

You can also use the "domain:" modifier to reject all pages on a domain. For example:

Domain: examplespamsite.com

If you are using a third-party tool like SEMrush, you can also generate this file through their backlink audit tool.

2. Go to the Disavow Links tool in Google Search Console and select your site. (You need to set up Google Search Console to use this feature.)

3. Upload the link rejection file. If there are any errors in the file, review the error report.

Disavowing backlinks from Bing

To disavow a backlink from Bing, follow these steps:

1. Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools .

2. In the “SEO” tab, go to “Backlinks”.

3. Click the “Disavow Links” option.

4. Submit the URLs you want to reject. You can submit up to 100 URLs at a time.