How To Identify Bad Backlinks For Lawyer SEO

Law Firm SEO Guide To Finding Low-Quality Backlinks

Because link building and quality content are two of the most essential indications for your website's ranking and Lawyer SEO, you must take proactive action against bad backlinks, impairing a site's ranking in the SERPs.

Think of backlinks as an association between pages (or, for our purposes today, a link between websites). When high-quality and reputable sites link to your content, then search engines will associate you with high-quality in reputability.

Unfortunately, this also applies to links from low-quality websites. If you're getting links from untrustworthy websites, search engines will also consider you untrustworthy.

Remember: Although one or two links won't affect your Lawyer SEO, getting a high percentage of spammy backlinks can start to affect your rankings in the SERPs.

What Are Bad Backlinks?

Bad backlinks come in various forms. Most of the time, they are spammy or untrustworthy links associated with your website and make it look unprofessional.

Remember: You might not even know you have these bad backlinks. So it's best to constantly audit your backlinks by managing them and removing ones you find suspicious.

These links may come from link farms, link wheels, and black hat SEO practices like dropping links all over the internet, and they do not respect Google criteria.

The following are examples of harmful backlinks to be aware of:

1. Low-Quality Directory Sites

Low-quality content with little value is more widespread on directory sites. These directories are often used to generate backlinks that are supposedly going to help build your backlink profile.

However, Google has gotten better at identifying these websites, so there's really no incentive to keep backlinks coming from them.

2. Websites With Thin, Duplicate, Or Plagiarized Content

Because Google devalues links from duplicated pages or sites, getting backlinks from these sites can severely affect your Lawyer SEO.

Remember: Make sure the content from your backlinks is high-quality. You'll probably get better traffic from more reputable sites, too.

3. Private Blogs

Most private blog networks do not follow Google criteria. This is because they don't often follow standard optimization and spam control, so it's best to stay away from them.

Remember: Even if the owner of the private blog means no harm, their overall SEO ratings can still affect yours.

You want high-quality sites with great SEO ratings, too.

4. Blog Comments

Only links from the actual content are taken into account by search engines. Dropping your links in blog comments is the quickest method to turn them into spam.

This is also a black hat method used by marketers back when Google and other search engines didn't have sophisticated algorithms.

Remember: Check whether the backlinks you're getting are coming from the actual content and not just comments in the blog.

5. Link Farms

Link farms are a black hat SEO strategy that purposefully creates backlinks to your content for link building. The content in these websites is often low-quality, irrelevant, and generally not great for your Lawyer SEO.

Remember: Again, Google is getting really good at detecting these types of websites, so there's really no benefit in keeping backlinks from them.

6. Penalized Websites

Again, backlinks are a way to associate your websites with others. If a website has previously been penalized before, then it's likely because it violated Google's rules.

Additionally, because Google does not crawl or index penalized sites, having links from them will almost certainly hurt your rankings.

Remember: Unindexed sites are regarded as untrustworthy.

Bottom-line

To improve your ranking in the SERPs, you should aim to collect organic links from reputable sources. Posting content that draws backlinks or connects with experts, rather than using shortcuts like buying links, is the best way to get high-quality backlinks.

Additionally, bad backlinks are sometimes out of your control. Some malicious entities might use Negative SEO tactics to knock you out of the competition, so make sure to pay attention to your backlink profile.

Our Lawyer SEO Experts At LawyerLeadMachine Can Help Your Law Firm

Lawyer SEO can boost your site traffic, improve rankings, increase conversions, and enhance user experience. With the right design and optimizations, you'll be able to climb up the rankings in the SERPs.

To get you started on your Law Firm SEO strategy started, review your options here.