Backlinking is important to ranking well on search engines. Quality of the referring site is very detrimental to the “weight” of the link back to your site or page. There are however bad SEO practices out there where people blanket post their site all over spammy looking websites. This really hurts your credibility and reputation in a negative way sites search engine ranking.
Google has a way for you to request the link on their site doesn’t get indexed. However, they require that you attempt to reach out to the site owner first to remove the backlink. Providing a record of who, what, when, where on your attempts to ask for the removal is important to provide search engines to show proactiveness in your approach. Follow these simple steps to try remove a bad backlinks:
- Use a backlink checker and identify the links you want to remove.
- Find the webmaster’s contact information for the domain in question that has your website backlinked. If no contact details are available on the site, Whois can help you find an email address to contact for the domain name.
- Send an email to the webmaster (you can use this template), and dictate the page on their site along with the exact backlink to your site. Try to make the webmaster’s job easy and make sure he can find and remove your link with the information you provide.
- If you do not get a reply within 5-10 business days, send another follow up email. You must contact them at least two times for google to respect your disavow request.
- Keep records of all removal request correspondence to the webmaster (this is critical for the disavow request with Google). Use a spreadsheet like this.
Comment and let me know if you think there are better ways to get bad links removed!