How To Remove Toxic Backlinks Using Google Disavow Tool

You are a little confused about toxic baclinks.

Let’s clear it up…!

In this guide, you will learn to remove toxic backlinks using the Google Disavow tool and identify toxic links with Semrush.

What are Toxic Backlinks?

Toxic backlinks are bad links that connect to your website from dangerous or non-reputable sites. They can affect your website’s health and traffic.

For example, good quality backlinks will help Google consider your website trustworthy and give it high authority, trying to push you to the top.

It’s one of the factors in the ranking system.

If your website links to low-quality sites or spam websites, it will affect your engagement, ranking, and the site’s authority.

For that, Semrush offers a feature to identify toxic backlinks using the backlink audit tool and remove toxic backlinks from your site using the Google Disavow tool.

First, you want to identify the toxic links on your website. For that, we are going to use a tool called Semrush.

Identify Toxic Backlinks Using Semrush?

First, log in to Semrush or create a new free account.

Now, under the link building, click the backlink audit feature.

Before you start to do a backlink audit, you should create a project to audit the backlinks.

After creating the project, you will get your project tab, click it to audit.

The overview tab shows the overall score of your toxic links, which are linked to your website. It also shows the percentage of links.

Three colors are shown in the graph,

Red – Toxic (Score 60-100)

Orange – Potentially toxic (score 45-59)

Green – Non-toxic (score 0-44)

You should focus on removing toxic links with a 60-100 score(high toxic links).

Now, move to the audit tab. Here, you will find the links that are harmful to your site.

My suggestion is that you choose a domain and toxic score from 60 to 100 in the filter. Choosing the domain option makes it easy to remove every link to our website.

Then, select all, and if you want to remove the links manually, click remove. If you want to remove the links directly, click the Disavow option.

I suggest moving the domains to the Disavow option because if you move to the Remove option, you want to send the outreach mail separately to each domain owner to remove the links.

It consumes more time. So move to the Disavow option.

Now, export thesetoxic domains in a TXT format. I showed the format in the below image.

Now, you have the list of domains that affect your website.

You have a question: how will I remove these links from my website?

For that, use the Google Search Console Disavow Tool. You can’t directly remove the links in Semrush.

You will be able to identify and export harmful backlinks using Semrush.

Note: If you want Semrush premium plans with discounts, use the Semrush Coupon to reduce the cost of Semrush purchases. They are also offering a free trial.

Now, let’s see how to remove it using the Disavow tool.

Remove Toxic Backlinks Using Google Disavow Tool?

Let’s see how to upload the exported TXT format in the Google Disavow tool.

Step 1: Type the Google Disavow tool in the search box and click the first link, as shown in the image below.

Step 2: Click the ‘Disavow links tool page’, as shown in the below image.

Step 3: Select your website and upload the exported TXT format file.

So, the toxic backlinks are successfully uploaded in the Disavow tool.

Google takes a few days to remove this toxic backlink from your site.

You can’t able to see the result in a few days, it will take time.

Disadvantages Of Toxic Backlinks & How It Affects Your Website

Let’s talk about the disadvantages of toxic backlinks and why they affect the website and the rankings.

1. Affect Search Engine Rankings:

You know that Google considers the backlink to be trustworthy. So, low-quality or spammy links will harm your website, trustworthiness, and brand reputation.

Google will show your content to fewer people, consider it a spammy or low-quality website, and drop its search engine rankings.

2. Search Engine Penalties:

One of the worst things that happen is if you don’t remove the toxic backlinks for long and keep linking to your site.

Google will think that for ranking factors, you’re intentionally using spammy backlinks to increase your ranking.

So, the penalties will be severe, and your website will disappear completely from the search engine if you keep these toxic backlinks for too long.

Regularly monitor your backlinks on your website to avoid it.

3. Damaging Reputation:

Toxic links like spammy websites will damage your reputation and make your website look unprofessional.

Readers will not like to read if you have more toxic backlinks on your content, and your views and engagement will drop daily, harming your overall performance.

4. Getting Backlinks Difficulties:

If you have toxic backlinks and poor quality, other high-quality domains will not link to your site, even if we reach out for backlinks.

5. Wasted Crawl Budget:

Studies say search engines have limited time and resources to crawl and index websites.

When they identify a toxic baclink from your site, they could waste their time on irrelevant pages and it will not focus on your valuable content.

This makes it harder for search engines to crawl and index your valuable pages.

Conclusion

In this guide, I cover how to identify and remove toxic backlinks using Semrush and the Google Disavow Tool.

Additionally, I talked about the disadvantages and the reasons that affect your website because of toxic backlinks.

It is a major drawback for your website. It will damage your reputation, brand, rankings, and user experience.

So, monitor your site backlinks once or twice weekly and remove toxic links to protect your website’s health.

Now, you understand toxic backlinks, right?

If you have any doubts, drop them in the comment box…!