Google’s Search Team Analyst, Gary Illyes, answers questions about how to alert Google about toxic link sabotage.
The question “How to alert Google of sabotage via toxic links” was asked during a recent Google office-hours session.
Toxic link recap
Toxic links are low-quality links originating from low-quality sites that can negatively affect your website’s SEO and ranking ability on Google.
The disavow link industry invented the phrase “toxic backlinks” to use in their marketing campaigns after Google implemented its Penguin algorithm link update in 2012. This update aimed to penalize sites using low-quality and paid links, often to sabotage their competitors’ websites, and ensured that they removed the toxic links and disavowed the rest.
How to alert Google of toxic links
Gary Illyes read out the question 8:26 into the podcast.
Here’s Gary’s answer:
- “I know what I would do: I’d ignore those links.”
Gary explained:
- “Generally, Google is really, really good at ignoring links that are irrelevant to the site they’re pointing at. If you feel like it, you can always disavow those toxic links or perhaps file a spam report.”
Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, gave similar advice back in 2019 when answering a question about what links Google ignores during a webmaster hangout.
The question was:
- “How does Google treat backlinks from website analysis websites or user profiles?”
Mueller’s reply then was like Gary’s:
- “I guess user-generated content and automatically generated content sites. For the most part, we ignore those because, like, they link to everything, and it’s easy to recognize, so that’s something that we essentially ignore.”
Google’s advice on disavowing links
Google’s Search Console Help Center explains that site owners can use the disavow tool to inform Google about unnatural or paid links to their site when they receive a manual action.
Google advises:
When to disavow links
Google says you can only file a link disavow tool under two conditions and that most sites won’t need the tool.
Here are those conditions:
When to fix broken links
Later in the Google Office Hours podcast, Gary was asked another question about links; this time, the focus was on broken backlinks.
The question:
- “Should I fix all broken backlinks to my site to improve overall SEO?”
Google’s Gary Ilyes answered:
- “You should fix the broken backlinks that you think would be helpful for your users. You can’t possibly fix all the links, especially once your site grew to the size of a mammoth. Or brontosaurus.”
Although Gary’s advice goes against traditional SEO practices of fixing broken backlinks to maximize the number of available links for a website, it’s worth considering, as it could prove beneficial.
When he is not writing content, Terry can be found on his boat in Italy or chilling in his villa in Spain.
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