Toxic Backlink

Once it became known that a backlink — a link another site points at your address — lifts rankings, a market for buying and selling them appeared. Agencies still send email offering to place one for $23. Search engines started treating links like that as rank manipulation and penalizing them.

The trouble is that teams who never bought any get caught too. Pagedeck has never purchased a link, and in one quarter forty links appeared at once from gambling sites. Who placed them and why was unknowable, and there was no way to find out. A link is something somebody else types into their own site, so there is no mechanism on your end to prevent it.

That's why off-page SEO, the work of building reputation outside your own site to raise rankings, carries one branch for risk. Managing only the acquisition half means managing half of the job.

Links judged toxic are usually one of three kinds.

1. Purchased links. A site with no relation to your subject suddenly carrying a sentence recommending your product is normally this.
2. Links from auto-generated sites. Pages where the text doesn't read as sentences at all and links are piled up in place of writing.
3. Links from sites with nothing to do with your field. There is no reason for a gambling site to link a collaborative document tool.

When a search engine rules this manipulation, the whole site drops back in results. Recovery takes months, and that clock starts only after the links come off.

The review runs once a quarter, in three steps.

1. Go through the list of newly arrived links. What stands out is a cluster appearing in a short window from sites with very low domain authority, the estimated score for a whole domain's trust.
2. Request removal wherever someone is reachable. An agency that sold the link usually doesn't reply.
3. Submit the rest to the search engine as a disavow list, asking for them to be excluded from evaluation.

Step 3 carries a warning. Write the list too broadly and legitimate links drop out of the evaluation with the rest. A link you can't judge is better left off the list.

"Forty links from gambling sites showed up last month. I'm submitting a disavow."

Excluding links that arrived regardless of anything the team did.

"Ignore the email offering to sell us links. A $23 placement can push the whole site back."

Weighing a short-term gain against a long-term risk.

"This one's ambiguous so I left it off the disavow. Get it wrong and good links go too."

Choosing not to act while the judgment is uncertain.

At Pagedeck, Ravi reviews the new links every quarter. Collecting them and removing them get looked at in the same session. Gain twelve links in a quarter and remove eight, and the number that actually went up is four.