Facing a Drop in Backlink Quality? How to Clean Up Your Profile and Reclaim Authority 

So, you’re a website owner or an SEO specialist looking to rank a website at the top of search engine rankings. You have top-quality content, and you have already put a lot of effort into building backlinks in the past. But to your surprise, the efforts have yielded poor results. 

• No surge in website traffic. 
• No improvement in search engine rankings. 
• Even the backlinks you achieved have dropped. 

But this year will be different. Because this year you are going to do something different with your backlink strategy. Something that will ease your way into 2025. 

To achieve unprecedented results in your search engine rankings:

• You need a backlink profile you can rely on. 
• One that can enhance your website’s authority and visibility. 
• Beyond that, you need an SEO strategy for backlink cleanup to make your backlink profile efficient and effective again. 

This will only happen when you focus on the quality of your backlinks and avoid spammy or paid and irrelevant links. 

So, how can you leverage backlink quality to its full potential in your SEO strategy? 

At Mavlers, we have a team of 20+ link-building experts who have successfully worked with over 100+ clients and retained 95% of them. The experts have generated over a splendid 20,000+ links. 

If you’re ready to unlock the potential of high-quality backlinks and drive your SEO success, here is the Table of Contents we need to go through. 

How do You Identify Low Quality Backlinks?

How Low-Quality Backlinks Hurt Your SEO? 

4 Steps to Clean Up Your Backlink Profile and Reclaim Authority 

Proactive Strategies to Maintain a Healthy Backlink Profile 

By the end of this blog, you will have all the information in your arsenal to make an informed decision about maintaining a high-quality backlink profile. Let’s dive right into the importance of backlink quality in SEO.

How do you identify bad backlinks?

Low-quality backlinks are called so because they contribute little or nothing to your SEO efforts. They may even negatively affect your website’s rankings. These bad backlinks are generally a result of link farming, paid links, or irrelevant directories. 

Here are the characteristics that define a low-quality backlink: 

• Irrelevant: These links are not relevant to your industry or niche. They are created just to increase the number of backlinks. 
• Spammy: They come from websites known for spammy or illegal practices such as the black hat technique. 
• Penalized sites: These links come from websites that have already been penalized by search engines for violating guidelines or using false practices. 

So, the first thing to do is check bad backlinks before moving forward. 

How low-quality backlinks hurt your SEO? 

Here are some adverse effects of low-quality backlinks on your website’s SEO. 

• You will witness a sudden drop in your search engine rankings due to toxic links. 
• Your website’s authority and trust score will take a hit. 
• You will find it harder to rank your competitive keywords. 
• There will be an increased risk of penalties accrued by search engines. 

Now, let’s talk about how to clean these poor-quality backlinks and get back on track. 

4 steps to clean up your Backlink Profile and reclaim authority 

There is only one way to regain your lost possessions when it comes to backlinks—cleaning the backlink mess. 

Yes, you must clean up your backlink profile and reclaim your website’s authority. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to delete bad backlinks. 

1. Conduct a comprehensive backlink audit

Conducting a backlink audit is easy and can be implemented in just a few clicks if you can access paid tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, etc. 

However, you can use Google Search Console to analyze your backlinks and segregate the toxic ones that need fixing. Leaving them as they are may harm your overall SEO. 

2. Identity and disavow toxic backlinks. 

When you evaluate the quality of your backlinks, look at factors like relevance, domain authority (DA), anchor text, spam score, etc. Use the tools mentioned above to pinpoint these links at their roots. Then, carry out a backlink cleanup process. 

To disavow these harmful backlinks, you need to create a disavow file listing all the URLs or domains you want to include. Then, you have to submit the file through Google Search Console. 

It’s recommended that you try contacting the website owners to remove the link before using the disavow tool. 

3. Remove low-quality backlinks by reaching out to the platforms

You can craft an effective email requesting the website owner remove the backlink. Ask politely and sound considerate enough to get your request approved. You can also automate this outreach process using tools like BuzzStream and Hunter.io. 

4. Build new high-quality backlinks to cover up the mess

Apart from removing the low-quality backlinks, you must also put in efforts to attain high-quality backlinks. 

Try white-hat practices for link-building, such as guest blogging, creating shareable content, conducting outreach campaigns, etc. 

• You must only opt for links from authoritative and relevant websites. 
• You must also try to fix your broken backlinks by reaching out to the site and updating the links. 

Proactive strategies to maintain a healthy Backlink Profile 

Here are some pro tips to help you ace the backlink game and maintain a healthy profile. 

1. Regularly monitor and audit your backlinks

When you conduct regular audits and monitor your backlinks, you can identify and address any issues before these backlinks start to negatively impact your overall SEO performance. Monitoring backlinks will also help you identify and remove toxic or spam links. 

These toxic links prohibit the effectiveness of your link-building strategies. By eradicating them, you will ensure your backlink profile remains strong and healthy. 

Frequently auditing your backlinks should be a routine part of your existing SEO strategy. For example, a quarterly backlink audit would be sufficient if you are a business. But if you aggressively implement link-building strategies in a highly competitive e-commerce business, you must audit more frequently. 

You can use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and Moz Link Explorer to help you identify poor backlinks, conduct audits, and gain detailed insights into your backlink profile. 

2. Avoid falling into link-building pitfalls

If you want to build a robust and effective backlink profile, you need to be very careful with your planning and execution. You cannot choose any random platform for a link, even if it has a good DA score. 

In one of the recent Google algorithm updates, Google mentioned that they value quality over quantity in backlinks, and relevancy is the key. 

Think about it like this: you’re reading a blog about Search Engine Optimization, and you click on the backlink mentioned in that blog. How would you feel if you landed on a healthcare website? 

So, here are a few common mistakes you need to avoid when it comes to link building:

• Do not buy links. At no cost. Purchasing backlinks can lead to penalties from search engines. It’s a shortcut that may result in attaining low-quality backlinks from spammy sites. 
• Do not use Private Blog Networks (PBNs). PBNs are a network of websites created solely for link-building purposes, and Google penalizes sites that use PBNs. 
• Do not overoptimize your Anchor texts.  Using the same anchor texts on a webpage can make it look like an unnatural practice and lead to penalties. Link different anchor texts to avoid this issue. 
• Do not ignore relevancy. Links from irrelevant sites can harm your SEO. Always ensure that your backlinks come from relevant industries or niches. 

3. Follow only safe link-building practices. 

Here are a few pro link-building tips that will help you clean up your backlink profile. 

• Always focus on quality over quantity without any compromises. A few quality links will always overpower your low-quality ones. 
• Use backlinks from diverse sources. Don’t simply rely on a single type of backlink from a single source. You can use a mix of guest posting, directory listings, social media mentions, etc. It will enhance your backlink profile.  
• Use only white-hat SEO practices. Try building relationships with webmasters and offer valuable content to earn quality links naturally. 

Key Takeaways 

That brings us to the business end of this article. We hope you have all the necessary information to make an informed decision about your backlink strategy. Keep our tips and tricks in mind while going for backlinks, and you will never be disappointed. 

Here are some more reads that will help you be more informed if you’d like to consider. 

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