How To Find Toxic Backlinks On Your Law Firm's Website

A Quick Guide To Toxic Backlinks And Lawyer SEO

Link building is one of the most essential aspects of Lawyer SEO. There are excellent link-building practices that boost your website's ranking. That said, when there are "good" practices, it means there are also "bad" ones.

To maintain your SEO, you not only do you need to learn the best practices, but also avoid the strategies that might hurt your SEO than help it.

Why Are Backlinks Important?

Not only are links essential for site crawls, organization, and page discovery, but they have an overall effect on your rankings.

For On-Page SEO, your internal links can boost discovery and distribute ranking power. For Off-Page SEO, backlinks from reputable third-party sites can send favorable signals.

Remember: If a reputable and high-quality site links to your pages, this tells Google (and other search engines) that your content is also reputable and high-quality.

That said, this means that if low-quality, spam-ridden, and generally shady sites link to your website, this also signals to search engines that your website is similarly low quality.

What Are Toxic Backlinks?

A toxic backlink hurts your Lawyer SEO instead of helping it. Toxic backlinks can happen for a variety of causes.

So, what constitutes a toxic backlink in the eyes of a search engine like Google? Here are some warning signs:

• If the link is from a website dedicated to linking to other websites, usually paid links.

• If the link is from a questionable source

• If the backlink was from a blog's comment section

• If a backlink has been inserted into a website's footer

• If the backlink is from a de-indexed website

• If the backlink is from a website that hasn't been indexed

• The anchor text is irrelevant to your site or page

Toxic backlinks can really affect your rankings. Thus, it's better to find and remove them before you receive any penalties and slip down the SERPs.

Remember: Having one or two backlinks from shady sites won't cause much trouble. However, if unchecked, you might be getting hundreds of undesirable backlinks, which will really start to affect your SEO.

How Do You Find Toxic Backlinks?

The best way to avoid toxic backlinks is to regularly audit your backlink profile. With a free tool like Google Search Console, you'll be able to see a list of backlinks that point to your website (among other essential SEO tools!).

By looking at your backlink profile, you'll be able to see backlinks to your website from across the web. Then, you can go through these backlinks and decide which ones to keep, and which ones you need to have removed or disavowed.

Remember: If your use the Search Console, you have to manually sort through the backlinks, as you don't want to remove or disavow high-quality ones.

How Can Toxic Backlinks Be Avoided?

Here are some of the best strategies for backlink management:

1. Keeping Paid Links to a Minimum

Paid links, or any link that has been inserted to pay for sponsorship fees for guest articles, etc., are something to avoid on your website for Lawyer SEO considerations.

Remember: When most of the site's content is there because they're paid, it's likely that the quality of the posts isn't a priority.

In most cases, these toxic links are placed solely to generate income rather than for editorial value. If you must include such links on your site, make sure they are marked as "NoFollow," eliminating their toxicity.

2. Exact Match Anchor Text Links Should Be Avoided

It's possible that inserting links into an exact match keyword and anchor text may be considered toxic. Keyword stuffing is a common problem for SEO rookies, and backlinking just exacerbates the problem.

You may get detected if you anchor backlinks using keyword-rich anchor text. These are frequently considered toxic, primarily when the links are employed for revenue-generating rather than editorial goals.

3. Backlinks From Comments Should Be Avoided

Some people try to add backlinks from other sites by posting links in the comments section of other blogs and forums.

It seems like a convenient strategy, but Google doesn't really like it.

Backlinks placed in comment sections are almost always considered toxic by Google, especially if they are considered spam. So this is something to stay away from if you want to avoid harmful backlinks.

4. Getting Rid of Toxic Backlinks

You'll need SEO tools to get rid of toxic backlinks (links that point to your site from other sites).

Using various backlink analysis tools, you can see and analyze all of the backlinks that lead to your site. You can then disavow such links on Google, telling Google that they aren't reliable and that you don't want them associated with your site.

You can build a disavow file with a good SEO tool to remove the bad backlink.

Want To Work With Lawyer SEO Experts At LawyerLeadMachine?

Lawyer SEO is an excellent digital marketing strategy for new and established law firms alike. If you want to learn about the basics, visit our Lawyer SEO Blog or check out our Free SEO Guides.

If you need more advanced assistance, we have SEO experts to help you out.