In the multitude of factors that exist to promote a website and especially to maintain and improve its SEO, toxic links have a big impact. A toxic link is a page link to or from your website that causes penalties in your ranking.

There is an entire “world” that revolves around toxic links. Most of the time, the owner of the website by ignorance or non competent skills create toxic links. On the other hand, there is what is called NEGATIVE SEO an unfair technique used occasionally by competitors or hackers to make SPAM links to your site and make you lose your SEO ranking.

Of course, it is rare to see this technique applied, but it is part of any serious analysis of a SEO strategy. Internet Cloud Canada, conducts a rigorous security analysis for customers to determine if they are victims of such attacks before and in real time.

So…, SEO is easy?

Absolutely not! We have mentioned several times in our posts that it is really difficult for a novice. That is why we present regular posts on factors affecting the ranking of your web sites and your pages.

My website have toxic links?

There are some factors that can tell you if your website has toxic links:

1. You receive a notice from Google stating that you have.

2. You see a fast decrease of your ranking in Google.

3. Your pages are not indexed.

4. Your site is attacked by a virus or malware infection.

Keep the links in your sight

You must keep the links of your website in your sight constantly. For this, the Google Webmasters tools are perfect! Simply go to the “Search Traffic” section and “Links to your site”. You can view and download the list as needed.

It will be easy to identify wich website links to your’s and if by mistake or because you suffer of NEGATIVE SEO attack you have some bad links. Google let you build a disavow links list if needed. Google established this procedure to protect you from NEGATIVE SEO ATTACKS. Always act quickly in order to do not lose your good links and ranking.

Time is a huge factor in SEO. So if you do not keep an eye on your links and discover after weeks or months, an attack, you will see the visitors ratio drop on your website and all your related potential sales too. Consider also that if you have created a list to disavow links, Google response time is also to be taken in consideration before recovering to your original SEO state.

It is always better to hire a specialist in this field, and our technicians are at your disposal!

Protect your links from a potential yourself!

It can happen that “Spammers” pretend to be you and try to destroy your good links by contacting the operators of the referrers websites. So protect your links ensuring you always contact the websites giving you very good links via an email address under your own domain name and not with a free email such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc.

Also keep an updated list of your links, allowing you to find them if they ever disappear.

The “Spammers” also use the technique “copy /paste” of your website as a weapon of mass destruction by toxic links. Visit Copyscape and see who copy the content of your website!

I created toxic links!

It is possible to avoid creating toxic are links to your website by taking a few precautions:

A. Check the PR (Page Rank) of the website that will refer you. Although PR is not ever used by Google in the overall optimization, there is a gray area where we believe the PR always plays a role to some degree. The higher the “PR”, the higher the site is trusted.

B. Look at the contents of the site that will refer you and take care to see if it contains content related to your field.

C. Never pay for directory links or other web site.

D. Do not link you to websites that are already penalized by Google.

E. Do not make enemies on social networks or blogs or otherwise. We never really know with whom we deal.

F. Do not publish low-end content as a visitor on external blogs by linking your website.

Use these tips to protect yourself from attacks of NEGATIVE SEO and to improve the quality of your links on the Internet. Building a good SEO takes longer but gives the expected results! Avoid shortcuts because they are often trapped by penalties.