So, you’ve got some bad backlinks? Maybe you’ve paid for some shady links, or a competitor has targeted your website with link spam. Whatever the cause, you’ll want to know what to do next—especially if you’ve received a manual action.
In this article, I’ll share how to remove backlinks and consider the different approaches for cleaning up your link profile—depending on your circumstances.
How to remove backlinks—if you’ve got a manual action
Google says if you have a manual action for unnatural links, you should first try to remove the links from the other site and then disavow any that you can’t get removed:
“If you have a manual action against your site for unnatural links to your site, or if you think you’re about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines), you should try to remove the links from the other site to your site.”
Google Search Console Help
Here’s an overview of what you need to do to remove backlinks if you have a manual action for unnatural links, according to Google:
Check GSC for a manual action and start a backlink audit
If you’ve got a manual action (also known as a manual penalty), you’ll see it by logging into Google Search Console (GSC). Expand the Security & Manual Actions tab and click on Manual actions.
If there’s an issue, you’ll see a screen like this:
Assuming you have a manual action, the first step is to list all the domains you want to remove.
Start by heading to Google Search Console, exporting all the links, and adding them to a spreadsheet. These are the links that Google sees, so there’s no need to use a third-party tool at this point.
Find the unnatural backlinks you want to remove
Once you’ve got your domain list in your spreadsheet, you’ll need to start a backlink audit to identify the unnatural links. In your backlink audit, you don’t have to remove every spammy link, but it’s a good idea to look for common patterns to identify what caused the penalty.
Tip
If you aren’t confident in completing a backlink audit, ask a reputable SEO consultant or an SEO agency to do one for you.
What constitutes an unnatural link, according to Google? In short, it’s any link that is intended to manipulate rankings in Google’s search results.
Such as:
Paid links
Excessive link exchanges
Automated linking
Requiring links as part of your ToS
Low-quality directory or bookmark site links
Keyword rich low-quality links embedded in widgets
Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of sites
You can use a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to help find spammy or unnatural-looking links.
Here are a few checks you can make:
Are there any spammy-looking or over-optimized anchors?
In Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you can check the Anchors report in the sidebar. If there’s an issue—it can be fairly obvious from this report. Here’s an extreme example of easy-to-spot spammy-looking anchors in a digital marketing website’s link profile that looks unnatural within the link profile’s context.
Assess the overall quality of the domains
Does it look like a site that Google would approve of based on their quality guidelines?
Google has a whole section dedicated to defining link spam, but one of the core considerations is whether you’ve paid for links to manipulate Google’s rankings.
Contact site owners to request they remove the links
Once you’ve identified the unnatural links, you’ll need to collect the email addresses for these domains. Usually, there’s a contact form or an email on the contact page, or you could try the [email protected] approach. You can also use a tool like Hunter, or simply run a quick search on social media.
You should then request that they remove the links from their site.
Here’s an example of the type of email you can use to request removal – keep it short and to the point, and remember to send it from an email address that has your domain name in the email.
Hi {site_owner’s name},
I’m currently reviewing links on my website, and I need your help to remove this link:
{Their_URL}
It links to my website here:
{Your_URL}
When you have removed the link, I would be grateful if you could respond to this email.
You can also ask site owners to add a nofollow tag to the links, but I’ve often found getting them to remove the link is easier.
Once you’ve removed a few links, you can start updating your list. Some site owners will not reply to your email. Others will agree to remove the link but charge a fee for the link removal.
In this situation, John Mueller has said:
“If there are some links that you can’t remove yourself, or some that require payment to be removed, then having those in the disavow file is fine as well.”
Disavow any links you can’t remove
If you’ve tried to get the backlinks removed, but they can’t be removed, then you should disavow the links.
“We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe that there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.”
Google Search Console Help
In a now-deleted tweet, John Mueller confirmed this by saying if you paid for links and can’t remove them, disavow them.
If you choose the disavow route, please heed these words of caution from Gary Illyes:
“We said multiple times that the disavow tool is a very heavy gun. And if you don’t know what you are doing, you can shoot yourself in the foot with it.”
There’s a risk with a disavow that you can tank your site’s rankings by disavowing the wrong links. So it’s important to be sure that the links you’re adding to the disavow file are causing issues for your site.
Once you’ve got a list of domains that you think are unnatural, you should format your disavow file in this style:# Two pages to disavow http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html # One domain to disavow Domain:shadyseo.com
Then it’s just a matter of uploading your .txt file to this page in GSC.
Sidenote.
If you already have a disavow file, download it and update it instead. If you try to upload a new one, it will overwrite the old one instead of adding to it.
Once you’ve tried removing as many unnatural links as possible and uploaded your disavow file to GSC, you can request a review. You can do this by clicking the button Request review.
If Google decides you’ve done a good enough job, they’ll remove the manual action. If not, you may have to repeat the process until the manual action is removed.
Should you remove backlinks if you don’t have a manual action?
If you don’t have a link-based manual action but you have links you want to remove, this is where it can become a gray area—and different SEOs will have different opinions on whether or not to remove backlinks.
Here’s an example of a blogger who says he had lots of “spammy” links but did nothing—and saw no negative impact:
I started this site When Its spam scored 75 in Moz. Since then I just published articles, and I did not create any backlinks, No disavow or remove any links. pic.twitter.com/wVBCI0HJL7
— Fahim Foysal Prince (@FahimFoysalFFP) July 29, 2023
This shows that disavowing links without a manual action can potentially reduce your site’s organic traffic and that links still play a significant role in rankings.
When I asked SEOs on LinkedIn how they deal with low-quality links, most said they either do nothing or disavow them.
The poll showed that only 8% of SEOs remove low-quality backlinks from the source. Most preferred to either do nothing or disavow them. This is not surprising because, as we’ve already seen, removing backlinks is not easy and takes time.
The approach of “I do nothing” may surprise some, but with Fabrice Canel of Bing announcing in 2023 that they’re retiring Bing’s disavow links feature, it seems likely Google will follow suit soon.
Fabrice said:
“We can now differentiate between natural and unnatural links, and we can ignore or discount the latter without affecting the former.”
So the question really is—how much do you trust search engines to make the right decision?
Let’s consider the following scenarios
1. No manual action, but have seen a serious drop in traffic
Start with a backlink audit to see if there is any issue with the links if you believe you are at risk
A drop in traffic could be caused by many things, not just links—check your technical SEO for any issues or any Google algorithm updates
If there is a serious issue with links that you believe may violate Google’s quality guidelines, then you can remove or disavow them. Run a Site Audit crawl to eliminate any technical SEO issues.
2. A third-party tool says you have “toxic” links
John Mueller said the concept of “toxic” links is made up, and his advice was to move on to more serious SEO tools:
The concept of toxic links is something that’s made up by SEO tools — I’d just ignore it, and perhaps move on to more serious tools.
If you have used a third-party tool to categorize links in this way, it doesn’t mean that the links are necessarily bad for your website
If there is a serious issue with links that you believe may violate Google’s quality guidelines, then you can remove or disavow them
3. You have many low DR links on your site you don’t recognize
If you have a lot of low Domain Rating (DR) links that you don’t recognize, it’s usually nothing to be worried about
Low-authority websites can and do naturally link to your website—just because they are low DR, it doesn’t mean that they should be removed or are “bad”
If you are determined to remove or disavow, always manually review the sites in question before pulling the trigger
In most cases, no action is required. Google and other search engines will deal with these types of links.
4. You paid for links and don’t have a manual penalty but have seen a drop in traffic
If you’ve paid for links but haven’t got a link-based manual penalty, the best thing at this stage is probably to do nothing
If you can’t sleep at night due to the guilt of your paid links, then you can disavow or remove them, but in most cases, consider what else could be the issue first.
Run a Site Audit crawl to check for technical SEO issues before you take any action with links. Do a backlink audit to work out if there is a link-based issue.
5. You’re the victim of a link-based negative SEO attack
If you believe there are many spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and you believe they are causing issues.
In basic attacks, Google should be able to understand what is and isn’t a natural link. For more advanced attacks, you may need to remove or disavow.
If you are at all unsure, always seek advice from an SEO professional before removing or disavowing any links.
Final thoughts
Removing backlinks isn’t most people’s idea of fun—it often involves the same amount of blood, sweat, tears, and toil as building links, but minus the dopamine hit of getting a high DR link.
By contrast, a disavow can be updated quickly, so if you know what you’re doing, it’s not hard to see why some SEOs opt for this option.
And, of course, the simplest option is to kick back, relax, and do nothing—but to do so, you have to have faith in Google’s algorithms to figure it all out—but do you?
Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about the non-search features that the GoogleOther crawler supports, then added a caution about the consequences of blocking GoogleOther.
What Is GoogleOther?
GoogleOther is a generic crawler created by Google for the various purposes that fall outside of those of bots that specialize for Search, Ads, Video, Images, News, Desktop and Mobile. It can be used by internal teams at Google for research and development in relation to various products.
The official description of GoogleOther is:
“GoogleOther is the generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development.”
Something that may be surprising is that there are actually three kinds of GoogleOther crawlers.
Three Kinds Of GoogleOther Crawlers
GoogleOther Generic crawler for public URLs
GoogleOther-Image Optimized to crawl public image URLs
GoogleOther-Video Optimized to crawl public video URLs
All three GoogleOther crawlers can be used for research and development purposes. That’s just one purpose that Google publicly acknowledges that all three versions of GoogleOther could be used for.
What Non-Search Features Does GoogleOther Support?
Google doesn’t say what specific non-search features GoogleOther supports, probably because it doesn’t really “support” a specific feature. It exists for research and development crawling which could be in support of a new product or an improvement in a current product, it’s a highly open and generic purpose.
This is the question asked that Gary narrated:
“What non-search features does GoogleOther crawling support?”
Gary Illyes answered:
“This is a very topical question, and I think it is a very good question. Besides what’s in the public I don’t have more to share.
GoogleOther is the generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development.
Historically Googlebot was used for this, but that kind of makes things murky and less transparent, so we launched GoogleOther so you have better controls over what your site is crawled for.
That said GoogleOther is not tied to a single product, so opting out of GoogleOther crawling might affect a wide range of things across the Google universe; alas, not Search, search is only Googlebot.”
It Might Affect A Wide Range Of Things
Gary is clear that blocking GoogleOther wouldn’t have an affect on Google Search because Googlebot is the crawler used for indexing content. So if blocking any of the three versions of GoogleOther is something a site owner wants to do, then it should be okay to do that without a negative effect on search rankings.
But Gary also cautioned about the outcome that blocking GoogleOther, saying that it would have an effect on other products and services across Google. He didn’t state which other products it could affect nor did he elaborate on the pros or cons of blocking GoogleOther.
Pros And Cons Of Blocking GoogleOther
Whether or not to block GoogleOther doesn’t necessarily have a straightforward answer. There are several considerations to whether doing that makes sense.
Pros
Inclusion in research for a future Google product that’s related to search (maps, shopping, images, a new feature in search) could be useful. It might be helpful to have a site included in that kind of research because it might be used for testing something good for a site and be one of the few sites chosen to test a feature that could increase earnings for a site.
Another consideration is that blocking GoogleOther to save on server resources is not necessarily a valid reason because GoogleOther doesn’t seem to crawl so often that it makes a noticeable impact.
If blocking Google from using site content for AI is a concern then blocking GoogleOther will have no impact on that at all. GoogleOther has nothing to do with crawling for Google Gemini apps or Vertex AI, including any future products that will be used for training associated language models. The bot for that specific use case is Google-Extended.
Cons
On the other hand it might not be helpful to allow GoogleOther if it’s being used to test something related to fighting spam and there’s something the site has to hide.
It’s possible that a site owner might not want to participate if GoogleOther comes crawling for market research or for training machine learning models (for internal purposes) that are unrelated to public-facing products like Gemini and Vertex.
Allowing GoogleOther to crawl a site for unknown purposes is like giving Google a blank check to use your site data in any way they see fit outside of training public-facing LLMs or purposes related to named bots like GoogleBot.
Takeaway
Should you block GoogleOther? It’s a coin toss. There are possible potential benefits but in general there isn’t enough information to make an informed decision.
Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours podcast at the 1:30 minute mark:
A new study finds that despite concerns about AI in online services, users are more satisfied with search engines and social media platforms than before.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) conducted its annual survey of search and social media users, finding that satisfaction has either held steady or improved.
This comes at a time when major tech companies are heavily investing in AI to enhance their services.
Search Engine Satisfaction Holds Strong
Google, Bing, and other search engines have rapidly integrated AI features into their platforms over the past year. While critics have raised concerns about potential negative impacts, the ACSI study suggests users are responding positively.
Google maintains its position as the most satisfying search engine with an ACSI score of 81, up 1% from last year. Users particularly appreciate its AI-powered features.
Interestingly, Bing and Yahoo! have seen notable improvements in user satisfaction, notching 3% gains to reach scores of 77 and 76, respectively. These are their highest ACSI scores in over a decade, likely due to their AI enhancements launched in 2023.
The study hints at the potential of new AI-enabled search functionality to drive further improvements in the customer experience. Bing has seen its market share improve by small but notable margins, rising from 6.35% in the first quarter of 2023 to 7.87% in Q1 2024.
Customer Experience Improvements
The ACSI study shows improvements across nearly all benchmarks of the customer experience for search engines. Notable areas of improvement include:
Ease of navigation
Ease of using the site on different devices
Loading speed performance and reliability
Variety of services and information
Freshness of content
These improvements suggest that AI enhancements positively impact various aspects of the search experience.
Social Media Sees Modest Gains
For the third year in a row, user satisfaction with social media platforms is on the rise, increasing 1% to an ACSI score of 74.
TikTok has emerged as the new industry leader among major sites, edging past YouTube with a score of 78. This underscores the platform’s effective use of AI-driven content recommendations.
Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have also seen significant improvements in user satisfaction, showing 3-point gains. While Facebook remains near the bottom of the industry at 69, Instagram’s score of 76 puts it within striking distance of the leaders.
Challenges Remain
Despite improvements, the study highlights ongoing privacy and advertising challenges for search engines and social media platforms. Privacy ratings for search engines remain relatively low but steady at 79, while social media platforms score even lower at 73.
Advertising experiences emerge as a key differentiator between higher- and lower-satisfaction brands, particularly in social media. New ACSI benchmarks reveal user concerns about advertising content’s trustworthiness and personal relevance.
Why This Matters For SEO Professionals
This study provides an independent perspective on how users are responding to the AI push in online services. For SEO professionals, these findings suggest that:
AI-enhanced search features resonate with users, potentially changing search behavior and expectations.
The improving satisfaction with alternative search engines like Bing may lead to a more diverse search landscape.
The continued importance of factors like content freshness and site performance in user satisfaction aligns with long-standing SEO best practices.
As AI becomes more integrated into our online experiences, SEO strategies may need to adapt to changing user preferences.
Google has announced plans to transition all retailers to its updated Merchant Center platform by September.
This move will affect e-commerce businesses globally and comes ahead of the holiday shopping season.
The Merchant Center is a tool for online retailers to manage how their products appear across Google’s shopping services.
Key Changes & Features
The new Merchant Center includes several significant updates.
Product Studio
An AI-powered tool for content creation. Google reports that 80% of current users view it as improving efficiency.
This feature allows retailers to generate tailored product assets, animate still images, and modify existing product images to match brand aesthetics.
It also simplifies tasks like background removal and image resolution enhancement.
Centralized Analytics
A new tab consolidating various business insights, including pricing data and competitive analysis tools.
Retailers can access pricing recommendations, competitive visibility reports, and retail-specific search trends, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and capitalize on popular product categories.
Redesigned Navigation
Google claims the new interface is more intuitive and cites increased setup success rates for new merchants.
The platform now offers simplified website verification processes and can pre-populate product information during setup.
Initial User Response
According to Google, early adopters have shown increased engagement with the platform.
The company reports a 25% increase in omnichannel merchants adding product offers in the new system. However, these figures have yet to be independently verified.
Jeff Harrell, Google’s Senior Director of Merchant Shopping, states in an announcement:
“We’ve seen a significant increase in retention and engagement among existing online merchants who have moved to the new Merchant Center.”
Potential Challenges and Support
While Google emphasizes the upgrade’s benefits, some retailers, particularly those comfortable with the current version, may face challenges adapting to the new system.
The upgrade’s mandatory nature could raise concerns among users who prefer the existing interface or have integrated workflows based on the current system.
To address these concerns, Google has stated that it will provide resources and support to help with the transition. This includes tutorial videos, detailed documentation, and access to customer support teams for troubleshooting.
Industry Context
This update comes as e-commerce platforms evolve, with major players like Amazon and Shopify enhancing their seller tools. Google’s move is part of broader efforts to maintain competitiveness in the e-commerce services sector.
The upgrade could impact consumers by improving product listings and providing more accurate information across Google’s shopping services.
For the e-commerce industry as a whole, it signals a continued push towards AI-driven tools and data-centric decision-making.
Transition Timeline
Google states that retailers will be automatically upgraded by September if they still need to transition.
The company advises users to familiarize themselves with the new features before the busy holiday shopping period.
