How to find if a website has paid or spammy back-links? Latest ways to investigate.

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

I would like to investigate about our website back-links if something is wrong. If there are any paid or spammy back-links. How to proceed on this exercise? We have been using ahrefs and seems like it's quite enough. Is there any way we can pull out the fishy back-links? Do we have any helpful data from webmasters about this?

Thanks

[Casey_Bryan]

Hi there,

I do a back link audit for my clients annually, just to ensure I have a good idea of what links have been created every 12 months that may be out of my control.

I usually pull all the links from as many tools as I can; Open Site Explorer, Google Search Console, Cognitive SEO, Ahrefs, SEMrush etc and compile them into a Google Sheet.

You'll find most of these tools will have some sort of gauge to show you the trustworthiness of each link, however I still find it's good to scan through them manually. You get a good feel for which ones are fishy after a while.

From there I go through them manually, to see if there's any really worrying ones (I also highlight ones to keep an eye on).

If there are ones I want removed, I will attempt to contact the webmaster to do this.

If I cannot remove certain links and I believe they are harming the site (typically it would only come to this if there is a manual penalty) then I'll look to disavow those links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

I hope this helps