Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about how to notify Google that someone is polluting your Google backlink profile with “toxic links,” an issue that many people have been talking about for at least 15 years.
Questions about alerting Google to harmful links
Gary posed the question:
“Some people are asking how to warn Google about sabotage caused by toxic links.”
And here is Gary's answer:
I know what I'll do: I'll ignore those links.
Google is generally pretty good at ignoring links that aren't relevant to the site they link to, and you can always disavow “toxic” links or file a spam report if you want.
Disavow links when necessary
Gary linked to Google's explanation of link disavowal, where it explains that the Disavow tool is meant to inform Google of links for which the site owner is responsible in some way, such as paid links or other link schemes.
It advises:
“If you have received or are facing a manual action due to unnatural links pointing to your site (due to paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines), try to remove links to your site from other sites. If you cannot remove or get those links removed yourself, you should disavow the URLs of any suspicious pages or domains that link to your website.”
Google suggests that disavowing a link is only necessary if two conditions are met:
- “Your site has a lot of spam, artificial and low quality links.
and- The link has led to or may lead to manual action on the site.”
Both of the above conditions must be met for a valid Disavow Tool submission.
Origin of the phrase “toxic links”
As Google has become more adept at punishing sites for low-quality or paid links, some in the highly competitive gambling industry have begun to create low-quality links to sabotage their competitors, a practice known as negative SEO.
The phrase toxic links was unheard of until the Penguin Link Update in 2012, which required penalized sites to remove all paid and low-quality links they had created and disavow the remaining ones. An industry grew around link disavowal, and that industry coined the phrase “toxic links” for use in their marketing.
Make sure Google can ignore the link
I've shared this anecdote before, but I'll share it again here: A friend of mine contacted me to say that his site had lost rankings due to negative SEO links. I looked into it and found that the site had a ton of really shoddy links. Out of curiosity (and because I knew the site was their main source of income), I emailed a rep at Google's Mountain View headquarters. The rep looked into it and replied that the site hadn't lost rankings because of links; it had lost rankings because of content issues related to the Panda update.
This was around 2012, and we saw how good Google was at ignoring links, and if Google was that good at ignoring really bad links back then, they’re probably even better now, 12 years later, with the introduction of their spam-brain AI.
Listen to the questions and answers at 8:22 minutes.
Featured image: Shutterstock/New Africa