When it comes to the ranking, the links earned by the website plays a major role. Back links can hurt or improve the website rank. There are lots of online resources for backlink building. But unfortunately, there are no proper guidelines for the backlink removal process. So I decided to prepare my own. I’ve spliced the guidelines into two sections. The first section talks about how to identify the backlinks which is really hurting you and the next section talks about what is the best way to kick the backlinks.

How to find Dark Links or Unnatural links or Toxic Links

We all desire to improvise the rank. However, the most important thing is, our effect towards improvising shouldn’t hurt the current rank at all. So deciding which links must be removed is the major challenge. The page rank, domain authority, relevancy, IP, Link title, traffic from the link, these factors can decide the links if it is a dark link.

1. 1. Page Rank
      Basically the site which got penalized by Google has PR of 0 or “N/A”. However, this factor alone shouldn’t be taken alone for removal. Please refer the exception section. PR checker – http://www.prchecker.info/
      Exception
      The newly launched site of PR will start with “0”. So, please refer the relevancy section to decide.
   2. Blacklisted IP Or Domain
      Without any doubt if the backlink site is one of the blacklisted or the IP of domain blacklisted. We can straight away go ahead and remove this backlink.
      • Google Banned blacklist checker
      • IP Black list – http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check
      • Domain black list check – https://www.ultratools.com/tools/spamDBLookupResult
   3. Relevancy
      Relevancy is one most important factor in deciding the dark links.

• • Industry: If you serve IT industry and one of your backlinks from the article “How to make Hot Dog”. Then it should be removed immediately. However, attributes words like “Developed By”, “Designed By” Or “Powered By” are exceptional.
  • Link title or “ALT” text: Any website can like your website with the attribute of “title” or “ALT” text. The text inside the attribute should be relevant to the linked page. For example, let us take this page https://www.askantech.com/ this page shouldn’t have the backlink with the non-relevant title or ALT like “wordpress development”. However, if you think the backlink is very genuine then you can talk to the webmaster to correct the ALT or title text.
  • Traffic: How much traffic you get from the particular backlink is also matters even if it under your PR. You can leave this link on the other hand if the backlink exist quite long and doesn’t not providing nay traffic to your site. This can be removed to keep your backlinks clean.
  • Domain Age and Number of Google Indexed pages: The older the domain age is good. The backlink can be removed if the particular site doesn’t indexed by Google.
    Domain Age Checker – http://smallseotools.com/domain-age-checker/ Google Index Checker – Simple open google.com and search site: http:www.domainname.com. If you zero results the backlink can be removed immediately.  Example: Askan Technologies website has a backlink from this website http://1freelancers.com. However when i try to find the indexed pages on Google by searching site:http://1freelancers.com. I found zero results, so without doubt we can remove.

• • Domain Authority: According to the official SEOmoz glossary, “Domain Authority represents SEOmoz’s best prediction about how a website will perform in search engine rankings” and it is calculated by “combining all of our other link metrics (linking root domains, number of total links, mozRank, mozTrust, etc.) into one single score.” In other words, domain authority is a measurement of a website’s backlinks.
    DA Checker – https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ You can check the DA of backlink and if it is under 20, it can be removed.

Examples of low DA links that could be natural:

1. • A link from a relevant, high quality website that is new and hasn’t yet built much authority.
   • A link from a small niche website that’s tightly targeted to a specific geographic area or topic that is relevant to your website.
   • A link from the personal website of an expert in your industry.
   • A link from a small local website in your industry.

How to remove the backlinks without affecting your current rank

After finding the bad backlinks, submitting the links straightway to disavow tools is bad idea. Google strongly suggests that one must take manual action before submitting to disavow tool.

• • • Create a Google sheet with the below headlines
      • Link From URL: URL where the link resides.
      • Link to URL: The page (URL) on your website the link points to.
      • Email contact: For the “Link From” website.
      • First Link Removal Request: Insert date of removal request.
      • Second Link Removal Request: Insert date of removal request (One week after first request).
      • Third Link Removal Request: Insert date of removal request (One week after second request).
      • Link Status: Live or removed.
    • Start link removal request
      Gather email ids of all the domain owners. You can use who.is for getting the contact details of domain owner.Please refer the email template below or you can come with your own template.

• • • Update all your request detail in the google sheet as per the template referred in the point 1.

Don’t use your own domain to send emails. Though it provides more authentications, the webmaster can mark your emails as spam. In return, it hurts your domain name more.

Record the date of every link removal request sent. In some cases you will need to submit a web form in lieu of an email – remember to also record these form submission dates on the spreadsheet.

Record every link removal and remember to stop emailing webmasters after links are removed. After five days have passed, send a “second notice”, to those who failed to respond the first time.

Once again, record every link removed and stop emailing those webmasters. After five more days, send a “final” notice to any holdouts.

The last step is to wait five more days to allow responses to the third round of emails. Any links still remaining, after three removal requests, will be added to the “Disavow Links tool.”

Conclusion

Yes, this is a lot of work. Each minute is worth spending and if it is not done properly, this will ruin. I’ve tried my level best to put the things here. All said, this alone cannot be used for the process. I believe, we need to put lot of common sense in the process of removing the back links.