Have you ever wondered why your rankings and traffic have plummeted for no reason at all? Have you purchased link building services who use spam techniques? Would you like to know how to view your entire backlink profile and remove the bad links that are causing you loss in search engine rankings and traffic?

Google’s Penguin update changed SEO for the better and put an end to the hedonistic days of link building, where any link was still worth obtaining no matter how poor quality it was. We now know that poor quality, spammy links can have a negative effect on a sites rankings. From personal experience a few of my websites that were ranking well on private blog networks dropped out of the sky after this update, and rightly so, the links I was generating were poor quality and adding to the already huge pile of spam congesting the internet.

How do I find my backlinks?

1. Sign up to MajesticSEO, there are lots of tools out there, I personally use Majestic because it’s free and gives a good, detailed analysis on your site. Signing up to a free account gives me a 2500 limit of data rows (ie backlinks), which is more than enough for my blogs.

2. Once you have signed up click on the Webmaster Tools in the menu where you will be taken a to verify url page.

3. Enter your url and then click on ‘Verify’.

4. You will then be asked which method you wish to verify, I chose the text file but you may choose whatever you like.

5. Download the text file and upload it to your root folder, once it’s uploaded come back to the page and click verify.

That’s it, you have now verified your site and have gained access the MatesticSEO’s powerful tools.

Using MajesticSEO Site Explorer to view your backlink profile

Here come’s the exciting part (or terrifying if you have been spamming), we are now going to scrape all of the backlinks to our site and then download them in an Excel spreadsheet so we can analyse them.

• In the Verified Domains  page click on the Explorer icon next to your url.

• Click on the ‘Backlinks’ in the dark blue menu bar and then click on the ‘Download Data’ button and export as an Excel document.

• Now click on the ‘Download Data’ button and export as an Excel document.

Analysing your backlinks and finding the bad ones

This task is best done manually, it can take some time, especially if you have a large amount of backlinks. For me I only had 52 backlinks from an old blog and it took me 10 minutes.

What are we looking for?:

• Blog comments with spammy anchor text (ie – fat loss pills).
• Site-wide links need investigating, especially if you used private blog networks. Make sure the sites linking are relevant and not full of junk.
• All those crappy links we use to waste our time and money creating, you know the ones I’m talking about: profiles, trackbacks, anything done with scrapebox, spun articles.
• Sites unrelated/irrelevant to your site (for instance my technology blog had a backlink from a massage therapy website, in other words; SPAM).

Now copy all of those links from the excel spreadsheet, open Notepad and paste.

Go through your text document and remove the links you know are healthy, just use the criteria above. If you have more than bad link from a domain you can make it easier for google and just use domain:examplewebsite.com. This will tell Google you want to disavow ALL links from this domain.

It is good practice to leave a description in the text file telling Google what you have done to try and remove these links yourself, place a ‘#’ symbol to tell Google to ignore that line.

Here is what my text file looked like after cleaning it up:

[code_highlight language=””]domain:———.com
domain:———.com
domain:———–.org
domain:——.net
#all of the above I have tried to contact but have no reply after 1 month
————.com/forum/members/——
——–.com/members/——-
#these forum links I have tried to contact the forum moderators but have had no reply after 1 month[/code_highlight]

Save the file somewhere easy to find, we are going to need to upload it to Google’s Disavow tool.

Removing bad links

First step is try to remove any bad links yourself, if that fails try contacting the website owner and ask them to remove the link. Chances are if they are spam websites they probably don’t have anyone looking after them and most certainly not an active contact address, if you find yourself in this position then the Google Disavow Tool is your last and only option.

How to use the Google Disavow Tool

1. Sign up for a Google Webmasters account.
2. Click on the ‘Add a site’ button (top right under your profile settings) and follow the instructions, you will need to verify your website using the same text file technique we used for MajesticSEO.
3. Once the site is verified visit the Google Disavow Tool.
4. Select your url and click ‘Disavow Links’. Another page will show and click the ‘Disavow Links’ button once more.
5. Now we want to upload the disavow text file (I called mine disavow.txt to make it easy)
6. Choose the file and click submit, you will then be shown the confirmation pop up.

Conclusion

This tool can’t be relied on too much, Google are treating this as a request so they don’t have to action your list if they don’t want too. Keep trying the manual methods I talked about above and hopefully over time you should see your link profile improve.