How To Check For Spam Backlinks | The Top #5 Auditing Tools

You are in the right place if you have been looking for ways or even tools that can help you to identify, track, monitor, and disavow any Spam Backlinks on your website in vain. Of course, just like many webmasters (including ourselves) and web-based business owners, you’ve done everything correctly for search engines to find your website and rank it, right?

Moreover, you might have ensured the layout is optimized by search engine spiders, generated keyword-rich content, and provided the appropriate. You should be on the first page of search engine results, but you aren’t. What exactly is going on? Unbelievably, backlinks can work against you. The good news is that you can identify spam backlinks in simple steps.

While, at the same, using the right tools to disavow these spammy links that can be detrimental to the rankings of your website. According to a certain Article by Outreachcrayon, spam backlinks can do a lot of damage to your site. Unfortunately, many website business owners have some spam backlinks pointing back to their websites, and they don’t even realize it.

The only way to figure out whether you have spam websites linking to you is to conduct an overall website audit. For such reasons, in this article, we’ll go over how backlinks may help and hinder your SEO results and how to discover and remove poisonous backlinks. Let’s begin at the beginning and examine backlinks, how they operate, and how they affect rankings.

Understanding What Backlinks And Spam Backlinks Are

Backlinks, or inbound links, connect one website to another. Google and Bing consider them to be a vote of confidence from the referring site. To put it another way, a search engine will place more trust in a page’s content with links from other websites, affecting how highly it ranks your website. As a result, backlinks are an essential part of off-site SEO strategies.

It’s, important to realize, that not all backlinks are created equal. Thus, when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the best backlinks are ones from big entities and respected websites while Spam Backlinks or suspicious website links can be actively harmful to your website. So, spam backlinks are links pointing to your site that come from low-quality domains.

Realistically, Spam Backlinks are those that come from spammy websites that are, typically, obtained from low-quality content and low Domain Authority (DA) or those notorious for spamming. Their traffic is often from countries you do not target, resulting in an unanticipated rise in your website’s traffic. You may have witnessed similar activity on your website, right?

As such, you’ll likely have a few spammy backlinks going to it. In other words, spam backlinks are links pointing to your site that come from low-quality domains. There are several reasons why spammers may want to target your website, and we’ll try to talk about a few of these reasons in a bit. First, we’d want to understand how spam backlinks can harm your rankings.

How Spam Backlinks Can Harm Your Website SEO Rankings

It’s no secret that spam backlinks hurt rankings by quite a very high percentage. Not to mention, spam backlinks increase the number of individuals who leave your website owing to the number of spam backlinks originating from you. If you have these backlinks on your website, find them and remove them immediately. Unquestionably, since they’ll harm your rankings.

As well as drive users away from your website and business. Regardless of why your site was targeted, however, you need to occasionally find out spam backlinks pointing to your website as they are terrible for your rankings. When Google detects spammy websites linking to you (and it will, sooner or later), it may start demoting you in the search engine result pages.

While removing harmful backlinks, do additional backlink maintenance while on the website. Notwithstanding, Google is paying closer attention than ever — because its reputation is based on its capacity to provide visitors with the most excellent quality possible. For such reason, you too would want your website to be part of its high-ranking algorithm moving forward.

The main reasons you may have spam backlinks:

First of all, you may have paid for them, perhaps unwittingly
Secondly, a competitor created them to set you up in the search engine algorithms
Thirdly, some spammers somewhere are trying to increase their own rankings and traffic

Oftentimes, many webmasters and business owners alike don’t realize the harm that low-quality backlinks can do. Be that as it may, they may hire SEO agencies that use “link farming” and other spammy techniques to build large quantities of backlinks to their sites to give them a quick ranking boost. Sometimes, these agencies aren’t even upfront about the strategies they use.

Yet, they are also quite sweet talkers with citations focused on delivering – they may even promise to use only “white hat” techniques. Nevertheless, despite a possible short-term ranking boost, these strategies never end well. For one thing, a competitor might have created those backlinks to make it look like you engaged in black-hat SEO strategies.

Related Resource: How Keyword Stuffing Affects Site SEO | 5 Auditing Solutions

By doing so, they’re hoping your website gets de-ranked or penalized on a SERP like Google — so that they can increase their own website rankings, traffic, and sales — beating you in your own game. Similarly, some spammers may link to you to get more exposure for themselves. Often, they’ll use anchor text containing keywords they want to rank for.

Their thinking might be that by linking to many quality sites, more webmasters will notice them and check them out. Also, they may hope to increase their rankings by linking to high-authority domains.

What is a healthy website spam score?

On one side, a score of 1%-30% is considered a Low Spam Score
A score of 31%-60%, on the other side, is considered a Medium Spam Score
While a score of 61%-100% is considered a High Spam Score

Now, if a website has a High Spam Score, chances are that Google will flag the website and push it down the ranks. Meaning, that the website might no longer appear on the top Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and this will affect the search traffic severely. However, a High Spam Score for your website, or a website you’re looking at, doesn’t mean it’s spammy.

The Best Tool To Monitor Your Website Links

Okay, since backlinks are considered votes, the more of them you get (quality ones of course) the more you increase your chances of being at the top of search engine results. Therefore, it is beneficial to know them. By analyzing your backlinks, you can identify opportunities for growth and gain insight into your competition. Also, understand your competitor’s link profile.

Ultimately, this can help you benchmark your performance, identify successful strategies, and uncover areas for improvement. On that note, you can find and check backlinks in Google Analytics 4 (called referrals) in the Traffic acquisition report under the Acquisition section. For your information, the report can be filtered to display exclusively referral traffic.

By closely monitoring your backlinks, you will be better equipped to create effective content, form strategic partnerships, and drive more traffic to your website. But, even though getting backlinks is rewarding, there are some that you don’t want in your reports. Apart from those coming from trusted sources, certain types can skew your GA4 stats or even harm your website.

As such, some websites have experienced up to 90% bot or fake traffic not infrequently. This means, that while it’s great that other websites are sending traffic to yours, backlinks that made it to your GA4 reports aren’t guaranteed to be of quality or relevance. In some cases, some may also distort your analysis and harm your business. That’s where spam link tools come in.

How To Check For Your Website Spam Backlinks

When other websites include links that direct to your website, these are referred to as backlinks. Essentially, backlinks are important because they are considered a key ranking factor by Google and other search engines. The more backlinks you have, the more possibilities you have for ranking. Getting backlinks is like having other websites vote in your favor.

And then, thereafter, secretly tell search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and the like that your website and its overall content are helpful, reliable, and satisfying to your target audience. As a result, the more you rank, the more chances you have of additional traffic, which ultimately means more opportunities to achieve your website goals.

Resource Reference: Why Google Analytics 4 Property Is Replacing Its Universal Analytics

Such as attracting more organic traffic to your website (through stand-alone pages, landing pages, or blog posts) and converting prospects into customers. You will know how to find backlinks in Google Analytics 4 to unleash opportunities. Like improving your ranking on search engines, building partnerships, protecting your website, and getting more conversions.

Just as we aforementioned, the only way to figure out whether you have spam websites linking to you is to conduct an overall website audit. On that note, you can do this for free or use a paid service. But, while paid tools are more effective and will help you get the job done quicker, free tools can also work too, as long as you’re willing to put in some manual work.

If you want to remove spammy backlinks from your website and make it safer than before, you must first check and detect spammy links. There are several ways to check spam backlinks, and outlined below is a comparison of three of the best.

1. Google Disavow Links Tool

According to Google, if you have a manual action against your website for unnatural links to your website, or if you think you’re about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate its quality guidelines), you should try to remove the links from the other website to your website. This will help you maintain a healthy spam score.

If you can’t remove those links yourself, or get them removed, then you should disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to your website. Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party websites do not negatively affect a website. In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or even a website.

For example, you or an SEO that you’ve hired may have built bad links to your website through paid links or other link schemes that violate the quality guidelines by Google for webmasters. First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible. That said, you can have a look at this guide for more details.

2. SEMrush Backlink Audit Tool

SEMrush’s Backlink Audit tool can be used to check for backlinks. Before performing a site backlink audit, you must create a project. Run your backlink audit after you’ve created a project. SEMrush will provide a list of all referring domains for you. There are three things to check for in this case. The first is your backlink profile’s overall toxicity score.

It’s great news if your toxic score is low! There aren’t many spam backlinks referring to your site. If your hazardous score is high, you must do more digging to identify those toxic backlinks. SEMrush makes it simple by rating referring domains based on toxicity. It will also inform you how many hazardous and potentially toxic websites are linked to your blog.

3. Ahrefs Backlinks Checker Tool

The Ahrefs.com backlink checker’s entire capability is unrivaled. Even for the most basic operations, the data includes the number of links on your site, the IP addresses from which the links are coming, which pages are being linked, and the anchor text being utilized. This data can be seen in various formats, depending on the features you believe are most significant.

The program also has its proprietary ranking structure, which has shown to be highly beneficial when combined with the major search engines’ ranking algorithms. Data is presented with various completely customizable characteristics such as do-follow links, no follow links, sitewide versus non-sitewide links, redirect links, links with images, links from .gov and .edu sites, etc.

As well as any other determining characteristics you can think of or create. These reports also include mistakes, cautions, alerts, and other key metrics. Whilst, allowing you to quickly identify and remove outdated or misdirected connections.

4. Spyglass Tool For SEO

Spyglass For SEO is a one-of-a-kind backlink tester because it is part of a broader suite of applications. It is, nonetheless, a very effective tool on its own. If you’re looking for a simple backlink checker with an understandable structure, this could be your tool. Regarding removing spam backlinks, the Spyglass application will download your backlinks from various sources.

Specifically, throughout the Internet, and then store them in a proprietary database. You can visit these links straight from the software and obtain real-time data on the links you have generated. The Spyglass application is a one-time price that can be significantly lowered if you purchase the whole suite of products it is a part of. It is also one of the few top-tier SEO tools.

5. Google Search Console + Google Malware Checker Tools

You can also consider using the Google Search Console Removals And SafeSearch Report Tool — to temporarily block search results from your website or manage SafeSearch filtering. The tool enables you to temporarily block pages from Google Search results on sites that you own, and see a history of removal requests from both property owners and non-owners.

And also, in order to see any URLs on your website that were reported as containing adult content. To remove content on websites that you don’t own, you can see this page to get all the details, or rather, watch the get started video below.

Last but not least, there are also a variety of Google Malware Checker Tools that you can consider to help you track your website for spam backlinks and equally disavow them. In general, a great Google Malware Checker will help protect your website from all sorts of malware. A quick website scan is fast and easy enough to find out if a website is not safe to visit.

It’s very important to check your website for malware regularly to avoid viruses that may pose a threat to your website. Fortunately, there are various tools developed to be special online malware scan tools — to help you detect malware on every website that you visit including your own website. Whilst, using intelligent malware detection software to do the work.

As a result, they’ll efficiently detect viruses and malicious scripts on different web pages. Most of them are cloud-based online tools that provide users with a report on web security threats. While, at the same time, helping you in securing the reputation of your website from potential threats — like inflicting viruses and phishing files into your website database files.

Such tools are:

What’s more, you can also use a tool like Link Litmus in your strategic content SEO audit plan for free. To enumerate, this is a software application tool that allows you to audit your most recently acquired backlinks, or rather, any new referring domains. The platform will check your website backlinks against 10+ quality parameters to your own advantage.

To ensure links are not;

In any way part of PBNs
Sold through cold outreach
On websites with open write-for-us options
Have minimal required Ahrefs qualification stats
…and come in green against our internal quality checklist

As a result, you’ll get to know exactly what is right or wrong with a link. They’ll help ensure you only have quality links — that make Google and other search engines love your website. To get started, all you’ll need to do is visit their website app page, paste your domain, and then click the button panel to test your links — you can paste up to 100 links for links audit.

If your website received a manual blacklist penalty due to low-quality links, you’ll need to submit a Reconsideration Request. It can only be reversed after a manual review. See if you received a manual penalty in the Manual Actions Report in your Google Search Console. Submit an appeal and explain to Google why the spam links were there and why it wasn’t your fault.

The Bottomline:

It’s, important to realize, that not all backlinks are created equal. Thus, when it comes to search engine optimization, the best backlinks are ones from big entities and respected websites while Spam Backlinks or suspicious website links can be actively harmful to your website. You should be secure from link-based penalties for the foreseeable future of quality content.

More so, now that you already know how to monitor for and delete problematic backlinks to your website. Just as a reminder, always pay close attention to your overall website’s backlinks. And also, ensure that the bad backlinks on your website are removed or automatically disavowed using a frequent backlink audit before it’s too late. The ball is now on your side!

Another important point, make sure that you also try to gather backlinks from as many sources as possible and filter them to identify those that harm your results. Not forgetting, that maintaining a clean backlink profile is critical to good SEO as well. Therefore, this means that you should choose reliable link-building services in the first place to help you drive your audit plan.

How To Check For Spam Backlinks | The Top #5 Auditing Tools

Understanding What Backlinks And Spam Backlinks Are