How do I monitor backlinks on my website to feel safe?

All you need to feel safe is to monitor backlinks and remove bad ones on short notice. Most commonly, I’m using Moz’s Open Site Explorer and Semalt Analyzer for a double check. But how to tell bad backlinks from good ones? Below I’m going to explain that.

What makes a bad backlink?

Putting it in plain English, the worst link is the one breaking (otherwise, violating) the main Google’s guidelines for webmasters. And there are a few general qualities that make a backlink bad for SEO purposes (otherwise, toxic backlink). Every bad link is always coming from one of these places:

• Any website or blog that has already earned a ranking penalty from Google - either having its rank degraded automatically with the algorithm, or dragged down manually - having links with them will make you all the same.
• Completely irrelevant sources, having no relation to your main website’s or blog’s subject. Considering that backlink relevancy is critical, you’d better have no backlinks at all, rather than spawning a lot of irrelevant ones.
• Poor websites or blogs with too thin low quality on-page content - being useless for real people, such sources will be similarly useless to get backlinks with.
• Low quality directories using to spin articles with duplicate content, as well as blog networks - avoid them at all cost, unless you want to earn a quick penalty from Google.
• Web pages dealing with adultery, gambling, or pharmacy, as well as the social bookmarking, hacked or malware-spawning ones.
• Low quality blogs that welcome a massive guest posting. Of course, guest posting itself is a great way to get backlinks, but have a double-check you are in the right place to contribute your own valuable content.

Monitor backlinks to get rid of the worst ones

Once we understood what makes a bad backlink, it’s time to check your own website or blog. As I already said, using one of those online tools is probably the best way to monitor backlinks. So, using either Open Site Explorer or Semalt Analyzer, you can quickly analyze your backlink profile and even make up a regular checkup schedule to monitor backlink in a timely manner. So, now you should immediately get rid at least of the worst backlinks to prevent them from harming your rankings.

Once you complete a quick backlink analysis, I suggest working on your .csv file to filter not only by warning signs (on each potentially harmful backlink) but by their status in Google Index. That way, you are going to instantly get rid of the worst ones marked as “domain not indexed.” Next, all you need to do is to carefully assess each suspicious link detected by backlink research tool - and take a decision whether it should be removed or fixed. After all, never hesitate to run a full in-depth analysis to monitor backlinks by the whole metrics - that would help you understand their value at scale.