Your website exists to establish your online presence. But is that all you want from it? Of course not.
You want your website to be visible to your internet audience so your business can leverage the revenue-generating potential contained in the online world.
Today, most people start searching for a product or service through search engines. They type in what they want and, more often than not, shop from the websites that appear in the top search results. Online searchers rarely go beyond the first search engine results page. They may “dig deep” and go to the second or third page in some cases. But that’s mostly it.
This indicates that the websites that manage to find a place among these top three or four pages are the ones that can potentially get the most visibility. So, ranking among these pages becomes the cornerstone of every business’s online marketing strategy.
But is that it? Have you unlocked the secret code to online success? Kind of. But, before you celebrate, know that there’s a catch.Finding a place on these top pages is not easy. You have to compete against hundreds, if not thousands of websites for the ten coveted spots on the first page.
That’s why businesses invest in search engine optimization or SEO. SEO services help a business website rank higher in search results by optimizing various website elements.
One aspect that SEO experts aim to enhance is your online reputation. You see, reputation is critical, even online. Google and its search engine peers are bound to maintain a certain standard of results for the sake of their own user experience.
Therefore, these search engines tend to rank the websites they believe are credible. But how does Google – a robot – measure credibility?
One metric search engines like Google use to determine a website’s credibility is its backlink profile. A website with many high authority backlinks is seen as a trusted and credible resource and ranked higher, given that all other ranking factors are met.
Therefore, SEOs prioritize link building and work to generate high-quality links for your website. But as your website gains some visibility, it starts to attract links on its own. Some of these are good, while others may be bad.
These bad links come from low authority or ill-reputed websites and are aptly called toxic links because they bring the toxicity of the bad website and spread it all over your nice one.And if the number of these toxic backlinks increases, your entire backlink profile can soon become toxic.
This toxicity can raise red flags for the search engine bots, indicating that the website is not reputable enough to rank high. As a result, search engines may either restrict your online progress or, in some cases, might destroy it.
The presence of toxic links on your website can earn you search engine penalties, which, in severe cases, can remove you from search results completely, potentially bringing an end to your SEO journey for good.
And without SEO, your website is very unlikely to get a share of the online visibility pie that promises business growth. What makes matters worse is that no website can avoid toxic links. Once you launch your website, it becomes a virtual public place, and you cannot control who links back to it.
So, how do you identify toxic links? Andmore importantly, is there anything to help prevent your SEO from falling a victim to them?
Landau Consulting, an NJ SEO consulting company, discusses how you can identify the presence of toxic links and get rid of them in this fun infographic. Don’t forget to check it out to find the answers to your questions related to toxiclinks.
