Everything you do on the internet is about building your credibility in a digital world. It’s about your digital storefront.
What are toxic backlinks?
Toxic backlinks create a bad impression on you.
So, imagine if your digital storefront was covered in graffiti text. Obviously, you’d do something about it because it damages your reputation. It implies something about you. Maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re not in the office very often. Maybe you’re on the verge of shutting down.
Toxic backlinks have a similar effect in the digital world. They are associations with websites that maybe have a really bad reputation. And you get tarnished by that association.
You didn’t put up that graffiti tag on the front of your shop, but it makes a bad impression on you. You didn’t create that toxic backlink necessarily, but it creates a bad impression on your digital presence, your website. And sometimes, people do create them because they’re just trying to build backlinks everywhere, and that’s a bad idea also.
Fixing Toxic Backlinks
You need to be selective.
I’ve talked about this before: You need to be really selective about where you are linking to and who is linking to you.
Now, if there are websites that are clearly trying to spam you or something like that, there are tools with Google where you can report those websites and report the links. But you do have to be careful about it. It’s not something Google particularly likes. They’re really good at identifying those sites anyway.
Build links only with reputable sources.
Your job is to be in control, primarily, of your universe, your website: who you’re linking to, who you ask to link back to your website — and you always want to make sure that those people are reputable.
