Improving the SEO of the WordPress site is one of the most important issues that the administrator thinks about after the website design is finished. Improving the SEO of the site is possible in various ways. This can be done in different parts of SEO, including internal SEO, technical SEO, and external SEO. One of the most important issues in the topic of external SEO is related to backlinks.
You can check the status of its pages with the help of various SEO tools. It happens to many people that by checking the backlinks, they realize that many of them are created from sites with different topics. These backlinks have a high SPAM SCORE and will probably increase the SPAM SCORE of your site in the future.
A large number of unnatural backlinks have a spam-like activity and will not have a positive effect on your site’s SEO. For this reason, you should quickly remove malicious backlinks with Google search help in the WordPress console. Google’s penguin algorithm detects malicious backlinks to websites and does not value them.
Because the rise of your site depends on the satisfaction of Google, You should do your best to improve WordPress site SEO in line with SEO principles and algorithms. Note that increasing the SPAM SCORE of your site also reduces the quality of the backlinks created on the website. For this reason, you will lose reporting customers and backlinks if you intend to sell backlinks.
What is a malicious backlink?
Invalid and malicious links will not have any effect on increasing the SEO of your site. Before the introduction of the Penguin algorithm by Google, many people used to buy backlinks to increase the rank of their sites unnaturally. But nowadays, this method is no longer the answer, and if you buy backlinks, your site will be fined by Google, and your ranking will be reduced.
Malicious backlinks include backlinks in link farms purchased backlinks, backlinks on low-value sites, backlinks on sites with high spam scores, and backlinks that exist in spam comments and become PBN backlinks.
Removing malicious backlinks and increasing site SEO
You can manually delete or disavow your low-quality and invalid backlinks with the help of the Google Search Console tool. This process is important and should be done with great care and sensitivity. Because if it is not done correctly, it will harm your site’s SEO. You should only use the disavow tool if many low-quality and spammy backlinks are given to your site. These links prevent your site’s SEO from increasing.
Extract links before disavow
To improve the SEO of your WordPress site, you must prepare a list of links to be disavowed. This list should be placed inside a txt file and uploaded to Google. You must put the address of each page separately on each line. It is not possible to disavow a subpath. To disavow a domain or subdomain, you must add the term Domain at the beginning of the address. The file must be encoded as 7-bit ASCII or UTF-8. You can write your desired description by adding # at the beginning of each page. On the Link Report page, you can download the list of all the sites that have given you backlinks.
Google search WordPress console
In the next step, upload your list and send it to Google. After visiting the disavow links tool page, select your site and click on the disavow link button. Then, by selecting the choose file option, you must select the created file. It takes about two weeks for Google to analyze the data. Google’s crawling bots recheck the pages and sites that have given backlinks. You should see the effects of this process in practice because a Google search of the WordPress console will not tell you any information about the success of this process.
Increasing site SEO and identifying spam links
There are various solutions to optimize the SEO of a WordPress site and identify spam links. First, you should identify the websites linked to your site using SEO tools. A detailed analysis of these pages will help you understand what anchor text and words are linking to you. There are two methods to identify and remove spam links from the site, which we will introduce below.
Using SEO tools like ahrefs
The ahrefs website is one of the most widely used SEO analysis tools to help you improve your website’s SEO. Using the features of this tool, you can check all links and keywords and compare them with competitors. Using the backlink checker feature in ahrefs, you enter the domain address or several pages to identify spam links. Finally, the CSV file. It contains links that are probably spam, and you should disavow them.
Identifying spam links using Google search in the WordPress console
Google search in the WordPress console has significant features and helps you identify anchor texts and internal and external links. Of course, it takes some time for the links to be searched in Google after being identified. The pages that have given you backlinks should be indexed and rechecked to send you a report indicating that your site’s link is on these pages. To view site links in Google, you must first enter the Google search in the WordPress console and click on the Links option. Then you will see a page with all the links.
You can see all internal and external links, domains with the most links, and anchor texts in the Google search console. But to improve the SEO of your WordPress site and find malicious and spam links, you must click on the More option at the bottom of the Top Linking Sites box. On the next page, you will see all the links to change their display order using the Target Pages and Linking Pages filters. By clicking on each domain, you will see how many internal pages it is linked to.
A tip about increasing site SEO and disavow
Sometimes, your site receives several backlinks and spam links without you having a role. To maintain the position of your website in search engines and improve your WordPress site’s SEO, you must remove them using tools such as disavow.