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