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1)Good links will always be secure i.e they will always have the https extension.
2)Good links will have higher page rank
3)Good links will have relevant content that the user has searched for.

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Not all backlinks are created equally. There are some things you need to know about link quality, link based penalties and Google penalty recovery.
To work out what it is that makes a link “high” or “low” quality, start by seeing what Google has to say on the matter.
The very first paragraph of the “link schemes” section of Google Quality Guidelines states:
"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."
At first glance this looks a bit scary as it sounds like any time you build a link with the aim of increasing your search rankings, you’re violating their guidelines.
But there’s one key word in the first sentence that makes a big difference to how this paragraph should actually be interpreted which is  the word “may”.
Google doesn’t say “are considered part of a link scheme”. They say “may be considered part of a link scheme”.
This is reinforced by the last paragraph of the article:
"The best way to get other sites to create high‐quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it."
So The key takeaways from this part:
-Google want you to create high quality, popular content
-They want any links to that content to be editorially given
So at the risk of upsetting a number of black hat SEOs, we can arrive at an overly‐simplified definition of link quality:
-Links which are editorially controlled by the linking site = good (high quality)
-Links which are built automatically without editorial control = bad (low quality)

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Links can be classified as "good" or "bad" based upon certain criteria such as where it comes from, how old it is, is it user generated or bot generated etc.

Some common characteristics of good links include :

- coming from a trusted/respected website
- is relevent to your content
- has a high rank

Some common characteristics of bad links include :
- coming from paid promos
- not relevent to content
- having hundreds and thousands of assorted links.

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Examples of Good Links:

Links from websites with high page ranks

Links from websites with good Alexa rankings

Links from website who already rank in the top search results for your target keyword or key phrase

Links from other sites in your industry or complimentary industries (i.e. a designer linking to a copywriter)

Examples of Bad Links:

Links to or from link farms or link directories with no useful content

Links to or from sites with explicit content or sites associated with spam or unethical practices

Links from your website to completely irrelevant websites (i.e. a designer linking to a dog groomer)

Using too many links in your content — resist the urge to turn every keyword into a link. It dilutes the important links and can distract the reader

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Good backlinks come from a trustworthy site, not a spam site. So look at those trust metrics you gathered. For example, a Trust Flow of zero could mean the site is new and hasn’t gotten any link love yet — but it also could indicate a problem. Watch out especially for a site with low Trust Flow and high Citation Flow — that means it’s getting a lot of link juice from all the sites linking to it, but they may all be spam! A link from that type of site could be poison.

Good backlinks come from web pages that are relevant to your page’s topic, as well. One or two links to your auto insurance site coming from a local dog groomer might be innocuous. But beware of patterns of unnatural linking. If every dog groomer in the state is linking to your auto insurance page, it could cause an eyebrow raise or even a penalty from Penguin.

Similarly, beware of global links to your site. For instance, if every page on a site has a followed link to your auto insurance quote page, that looks really suspicious to the search engines. If you see hundreds of links all coming from a single root domain, you should look to see what’s going on there.

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The main difference in good links and bad links is the quality of the website they are on.
Some examples of good links are:-
1) Links coming from pages with relevant and related content to your page.
2) Links from trusted and known sites.
3) Links that mix naturally with the content
Some examples of bad links are:-
1) Links from a website that is just set up for SEO links
2) Links from the comments of other websites
3) Links with over-optimized anchor texts
4) Links within lousy, duplicate texts
5) Links from US, while your local audience is in the India

These are few of the ways you can analyze your backlinks. Further, ways to remove such back links and different tools which help for the same are provided in the link given:

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More and more clients are coming to me for audits because they have been harmed by low-quality linking efforts, either intentionally, unintentionally, or possibly as a result of a competitor's attempt to harm their site.

As a result of having gone through several of these in the past months, I have developed a core set of guidelines for clients to help them understand how to deal with the problem. While it's not a comprehensive all-inclusive set, it goes a long way toward improving the SEO considerations of a site's overall inbound link profile.

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What is a good target for our links-to-root-domains ratio?
The rule is "the lower the better." There is no specific standard target number. If you have a writer posting regularly to a highly reputable site on a consistent basis, that is usually the ONLY reason there should be a high number of links from one site. Even then, all other quality rules should still apply even to that content.

_______________________________________________
For those articles with some minimum Page Authority and some minimum Domain Authority, should I leave those articles "out there"?
Do not trust PA and DA numbers. These do NOT address quality, relevance, or trust signals, and are HIGHLY SUSPECT as indicators.

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Please give us guidelines for identifying bad links that need to be removed.
Careful review of inbound links must be performed to evaluate which links are considered harmful or of the type unacceptable to Google. While this step is not likely to be perfect, it is however likely to identify the most egregious links known to exist.

A link is most likely to be problematic if:

The site where the link comes from is there purely to provide SEO links

And/or if a site even looks somewhat low quality

And/or if the content is not well written

And/or if the site is not relevant to your market

And/or the link(s) is/are not directly within the main content of an individual page

And/or the site name includes "SEO" or "LINK"

And/or the page Title is irrelevant to your market topical focus

And/or the page Title includes "SEO' or "LINK"

And/or the domain name looks odd (is made up of letter/number combinations for example)

And/or the domain country is in a country outside of your target market

And/or the link is on a "forum profile" page and was put there by your SEO vendor

And/or it's a "directory" that has lots of links on that page to sites not relevant to your market

And/or it's a "directory" that has entries where the name of the sites listed is mostly keyword stuffed nonsense

None of these symptoms should be ignored just because a domain or page has a high DA or PA, or PR(ToolBar PageRank). These numbers are NOT valid if any other bullet point is a "yes" match for that link.

Does a site have to have a high Domain Authority or Page Authority in 2013 to be trusted for links?
For those sites that send multiple links where the site/domain itself is a broadly problematic site, this can be beneficial from a link clean-up perspective. It's realistic to see that some of those sites are likely to be sending even more links than existing link review reports show. The end result (whether you've identified every link from a site or only some) is that you can contact one domain and potentially have several, several dozen, hundreds or more links removed in one contact step. But of course, that's only if the site owner cares, let alone can be reached.

Once review has been completed, an attempt will need to be made to contact those sites with links flagged as highly problematic, requesting those links be removed. Method of contact can be email, site contact form, or phone-depending on which method has been identified as being available, if any.
How can we ensure a link building company is going to provide us with quality results?
In addition to looking at the site itself for a "contact" page, with email or phone listed, if none exists, you can do a "whois" lookup to see if there is an email or phone number listed for the registrant or admin contact for that domain.

1. They will comply with recommendations as set forth in my audit implementation plan.

2. This applies to all recommendations, including link quality, type, and diversity

3. They will provide samples of actual content on the first several pieces they provide, if they are providing content

4. Such content is subject to your approval prior to placement

5. They will provide detailed monthly reports

6. Reports will include list of links or sites where content will be placed prior to placement

7. Link and site list subject to your approval prior to placement

8. Reports will include list of links to locations where content has been placed

9. Reports will include description of any other action they plan on taking the following month

10. Reports will include description of actual action implemented

If any contact option is available, that method should be noted in the spreadsheet for that link (or that group of links associated with that domain).
Image Credit: Shutterstock / chokniti
Contact should be attempted, and the date of the attempt should then be noted in the spreadsheet.

If no response is received within a reasonable time (one to two weeks), this should be noted in the spreadsheet. If response is received within that time, response ("removed," "will remove by X date," "refused," or "requires fee of $X") should be noted accordingly.

After all that work is performed, any responses claiming "removed" or "will remove by X date" should be verified and results noted in the link spreadsheet.

Only after all that work has been done should a disavow submittal be made, but only if you are highly confident that you're not including a lot of sites that are in fact, quality link sources. (The evaluation process is crucial because of this.)

Only after THAT, as well as implementation of other recommended on-site changes and audit priority fixes related to duplicate content, should a new re-inclusion request be made, that details and provides documentation as to actions taken.

_______________________________________________

Even a site that has a low DA and/or PA can be a good, valid link. For example, if it's a relatively new site, just getting going, or one that is a one-person operation, that does not mean the site is not valid, trustworthy, or relevant. It only means it's a new site, or the owner has not yet built up other signals. Quality, topical relevance, and link implementation are all more important considerations.

_______________________________________________

This is one of the most challenging issues site owners face in 2013. As a result, I've established a set of strict guidelines that I suggest clients have written into any contract they sign with a company offering link building, content marketing, or other similar services.

The above guidelines are, of course, just that-guidelines. If you wish to build upon them, or bypass any, that is your prerogative as site owner, and your right to negotiate directly with professional services vendors.

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How To Clean Up Bad Links and Establish Trust With Link Vendors - Search Engine Journal

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More and more clients are coming to me for audits because they have been harmed by low-quality linking efforts, either intentionally, unintentionally, or possibly as a result of a competitor's attempt to harm their site.

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Good Links

unique and useful content
popularity
high rank

Bad Links

blacklisted by search engines
bad neighborhood
having hundreds of assorted links

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PromotionWorld : Identifying the Inbound Links that are Good, Bad or Useless is the Pathway to Success.

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In a broad sense the inbound links can be categorized under three groups, Good, Bad and Useless Links.

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Bad links may include:

Links coming in from poor quality/spam sites.

Disproportionate anchor text links.

Links from blog networks.

Links from paid posts.

Links from dead & rotting directories.

Links from irrelevant & ‘untrustworthy’ sites.

Tools can be used for checking the goodness of your links.
Some tools are:
1. CognitiveSEO
2. Google Webmaster tools
3. Majestic site explorer.

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Links referring to your webpages usually increase your SEO score. However in recent times, Google has developed measures to detect the misuse of linking to prevent malicious increase in SEO scores.
A good link comes from a website with a good SEO score. Similarly bad links are the ones coming from a website with a bad SEO score, or one marked by google as spam. The negative marking of page referring to you also affects your SEO score. Hence, using special tools to monitor your traffic from backlinks, you can identify what kind of links point to your website.

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You've just identified a whole hoard of bad backlinks swarming your site.

An army of the walking dead- dead backlinks, that is-is at your door.

They're there to bite, scratch and eat your site alive.

Bad backlinks, whether they were created innocently or with the intent to destroy your SEO, can be really bad news.

At this point, all SEOs know that quality backlinks are important for their sites.

But some aren't aware of the danger of bad backlinks. There are several types of bad backlinks that destroy SEO metrics, kill SERP rankings and even bring the wrath of Google upon you.

These can be link from a spammy domains, private blog networks, low-quality online directories and so on.

You spend countless hours and dollars on your SEO link building campaigns. You don't want to end up with fistfuls of bad backlinks-and radio silence from the big dogs with high Domain Authority where you wanted to place your backlinks.

Of course, there are many ways to manually identify bad backlinks yourself. But if you want to save time, the best approach is to use your Monitor Backlinks account.

If you don't have your own Monitor Backlinks account, you can free 30-day trial to test it out and follow the instructions below to identify bad backlinks.

How to Identify Bad Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks is an SEO platform that consolidates everything there is to know about your backlink profile and key SEO metrics. You can use it to monitor organic traffic, spy on competitor backlinks, check your rankings for specific keywords and more.

Monitor Backlinks also makes it significantly easier to identify and handle bad backlinks.

After you add your domain, you can head straight to the "Backlinks" tab to see all of your backlinks in one place.

In Monitor Backlinks, problematic links are flagged with a "warning" icon on the farthest-left column. This warning icon is shown whenever a linking domain triggers one of these low-quality signals:

High Spam Score - The spam score is calculated by Moz to show a website's likelihood of being penalized. The higher the spam score This is calculated using different spam flags, like a low number of linking domains, a high ratio of "follow" links and so on.

Unindexed Website -This indicates that the website isn't currently indexed by Google, which could indicate low quality.

Low Trust Flow - In addition to the backlink profile, the Trust Flow also factors in the quality of traffic that flows through links. This metric is introduced and used by Majestic SEO.

High External Links - A high number of external links could pertain to a low-quality web directory, sitewide footer links or spam comments.

Unnatural Anchor Text - Finally, unnatural anchor texts disrupt the balance of your backlink profile's anchor text diversity. Good anchor texts include your brand name, naked URL and partial keyword matches.

Understanding Warnings

To check which low-quality signals trigger certain warnings, hover your mouse pointer over the warning icon.

This should display a small tooltip that contains important information about the warning.

From there, you can also decide whether to disavow the link or mark it as a false positive.

But before you get too excited, you have to verify the backlink's actual quality. This will be explained in more detail later in this post.

Looking for Bad Backlinks with Filters

Depending on the age of your site, there could be hundreds if not thousands of backlinks in your profile.

You probably don't even remember half of them, especially if you regularly publish blog posts. This could make it tedious to look for links with warnings.

Your Monitor Backlinks account makes it so you don't have to comb through your entire backlink profile by yourself. You'll have a slick "Filters" feature that can sort your backlinks according to different factors.

To get started, click on the "Filters" button and select "Warnings."

This will bring up the sub-menu where you can specify the warnings you'd like to filter for.

If you want to quickly identify bad backlinks that are potentially harmful, click "All warnings."

Keep in mind that you can also select specific warnings individually if you need to prioritize an issue.

After a few seconds, Monitor Backlinks will refresh the page and list all backlinks that trigger the specified warning(s).

You'll also notice that Monitor Backlinks shows warnings in other columns of the results page. For example, under the "EXT" column, linking pages with a high number of external links are highlighted in red, since this is its own low-quality signal:

Conducting a Manual Review of Bad Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks does an excellent job of apprehending terrible backlinks that must be dealt with immediately.

But before you go any further, a manual review of each linking page is in order. After all, it's entirely plausible for backlinks to trigger warnings despite having SEO value.

The key here is to review the linking page's content. If it offers little to no value or appears straight-up shady, then you've found yourself a bad backlink.

For example, if you look at the link below, you'll notice that it triggered a warning for having a high number of external links on the page:

However, you by reviewing the actual content you can verify that it's a legitimate post that's not only valuable but also relevant in your marketing niche:

For comparison, here's a linking page that deserves to be disavowed as soon as possible:

Notice the difference? The first one actually provides value to readers and cushions the link with relevant content. On the other hand, the second page is a jumbled mess of links across bulleted lists, images and sidebar menus.

The smoking gun is the footer, which is loaded with backlinks that use irrelevant anchor texts:

Labeling Your Backlinks

After you manually review backlinks, be sure to label them accordingly: as good, bad, pending or ignored.

This will help other team members determine whether or not a link should be disavowed or allowed to stay in your backlink profile.

In the case of our example above, let's go ahead and label the link from COS Sales as "good." To do this, simply hover your mouse over the warning icon and click "good."

This will change the warning icon into a thumbs up icon. The thumbs up icon is still highlighted in red, so you know that the backlink triggered a warning even though you've marked it as "good."

Remember, labels themselves can't be used to execute specific actions in Monitor Backlinks. They can't remove or resolve warnings, but they should remind you or another user what to do later.

And that's it!

You now know how to use Monitor Backlinks to identify bad backlinks and label them.

The next and final step is to address these bad backlinks either through disavowal or outreach.

What to Do with Your Bad Backlinks

With Monitor Backlinks, you can quickly handle these backlinks by disavowing the URL or the entire domain. Just click on the settings button from the left-most column and click on your choice:

A pop-up will appear at the bottom-left corner of the screen to confirm your action.

Take note that the link will still be visible on Monitor Backlinks. This time around, it will be presented with a red font.

You can then reverse the disavow process by clicking "Remove Disavow" from the settings menu.

Easy, right?

Another approach is to contact the linking domain's owner and discuss a more productive resolution. For example, if the backlink is flagged for an unnatural anchor text, you can simply request that they change the text via email.

If you suspect that a domain is intentionally spamming you with bad links, it's time to contact their hosting provider. You can identify them with a tool like WhoIsHostingThis.com:

Final Thoughts on Identifying Bad Backlinks

Everybody knows that SEO is a lot of work. Not only will it cost your time, it also requires your full-time commitment as a content marketer.

It would be a shame if all these investments go to waste just because of bad links.

With the tips above, you should be able to spot and deal with bad links through Monitor Backlinks.

From here, it's only a matter of time before your website attains its true ranking potential.

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How to Identify Bad Backlinks that Drag Your Rankings Down

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You've just identified a whole hoard of bad backlinks swarming your site. An army of the walking dead- dead backlinks, that is-is at your door. They're there to bite, scratch and eat your site alive. Bad backlinks, whether they were created innocently or with the intent to destroy your SEO, can be really bad news.

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Good Links:
1] The first metric that you can use to determine a good link is the page’s relevance, compared to your page’s topic.
2] Good backlinks oftecome from trustworthy sites, not spam/bogus sites
3] A good link usually flows naturally with the surrounding content.
4] To be safe, aim for contextual links
Bad Links:
1] Link farms, paid links, link wheels and other black hat link-building techniques can get you into trouble. Avoid them at all cost.
2] Links coming from unrelated sites or pages
3]  Links from sites with lower DA scores (<30 %) may be counted as bad.
4] Links coming from over-optimized anchors are dangerous.

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Not all links are good links. A website with misleading, irrelevant, broken, or factory-farmed links will make you and your site look bad to both users and search engines.

In industry links will help you more than random links from your friends’ websites. If you’re in the cupcake industry, links from cupcake, frosting, cake decorating, and baking sites will be worth much more than links from your babysitter, accountant, or golf buddy.

Search engines work just like the high school popularity chain: The more websites that vote for (link to) your website, the more popular your site will be with the search engines. That means it will be seen by more people, you’ll earn more clicks, and gain more website traffic. But before you drop everything and focus your efforts on building tons of inbound links from every place you can think of online, you must understand that some links are better, more savory, and more valuable than others.

Let’s go back to our high school example: The star of the football team inviting you to a party is a huge vote for your popularity and will increase your status among your peers pretty quickly.

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There are various SEO tools which statistically analyse, which of our backlinks are bad links for Off-Page Optimisation.
Here are various sources of identifiable bad links:
1. Poor quality links come from poor quality sites.
2. Huge link pool. It's a network of links collected from spam blogs and forums.
3. Site-wide links. If your domain does not have the necessary authority and receives a couple of site-wides from some low-quality sites, your site will get penalized by Google.
4. Web-Directory links. You do not need hundreds of directories to be listed on, only a few quality ones that are well known in your niche.
Websites with such bad-links get identified & penalised by Google's algorithm such as "Panda".
I've mentioned few important bad-link sources. To read about more types of bad-links & how to tackle them using SEO tools, read the article :

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SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies

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Since the last Penguin 4.0 (Real-time) update, lots of things have changed in terms of quality backlinks. Bad backlinks have remained the same, though, even if they were created some time ago with no intent to harm a website, or there was an arranged negative SEO attack or maybe a spammy link building campaign, with the purpose to rank high & fast. We've tackled this matter before, yet, we felt the need of updating this topic for 2018.

Toxic links have a higher effect on a website now than they ever had before. They can eat your whole website alive and stick it down, in the last pages of SERP. How, you might ask? Well, Google Penalites caused by unnatural links coming from:

To be prepared for the long ride and have a clean website, you should know that it requires two easy steps for a correct backlinks assessment. First, identify toxic backlinks and then remove bad backlinks. Some of the most known types of low-quality links are presented below. We thought on them through a guide to help you easily identify the unnatural links (link networks and low-quality links) that, maybe, caused the drop in your rankings. After that, you are served with tips and recommendations to clean your website of those links.

The SEO world has evolved so much in the past few years, which means the quality guidelines have become more strict. Links started to become somehow a problem, because of the amount of spam on the web. After reading this post, you will be able to identify low-quality links that hurt your rankings.

How to Remove Bad Backlinks

The steps for a clean website are simple. First, you need to identify the most damaging referring domains that are linking to your website, following the black hat links filtering explained below, and then remove and disavow the unnatural links.

Here are 4 steps to remove bad backlinks for your website:

1. Identify your bad links (you'll find how exactly from this article).

2. Search for the contact information of the website you have the link on.

3. Contact the webmaster asking him to remove the link. If you don't get a response in within 2 weeks, go to the next step.

4. Disavow the links and upload the file to Google.

Disavowing all the bad links doesn't have to be a chore. In cognitiveSEO you have to use the Unnatural Detection which it is a helpful buddy. It will save you tons of time, energy and money. Below you can see a screenshot from the tool.

You have to click on the unnatural link bar chart and a new window will all the spammy links will pop-up instantly:

You have to select the links that are bad and disavow them. Either you do that individually or perform bulk actions. All those disavowed links will be gathered in a file-format agreed by Google, which you can download and send it from the tool directly to Google.

The disavowing process applies to all category of links explained below.

1. Link Networks

Over 90% of the Link Networks are easy to spot, both by the human eye and by the Google algorithm.

Most Link Networks have the following common patterns:

Architected from blogs and forums, because they are easy to automate and replicate.

Links try to look as natural as possible by being put inside the content of a blog post or forum thread.

The owner of a link network rarely makes the effort to generate links back to each of the generated blog posts. This means that each and every post has a probability of having 0 or a small number of backlinks pointing to them.

Each site from the link network links out to at least 2 common money sites.

To find the links coming to your website from link networks you need to filter down the backlinks by blog posts and forum thread links, that are positioned in content and have a low metric (link influence, domain influence) and a low number of incoming links to the actual backlink. The hardest part is to filter large lists of links by the tag in Content and type of link (blog post, forum page etc). You can either do it by hand or use a tool that has the ability to make these classifications.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Backlinks Coming from Link Networks

By using cognitiveSEO, and applying a couple of filters, you can easily find those links exactly.

Order descending by Link influence to see the lowest quality pages first. Browse a bit through the links and use the link preview feature to quickly preview those pages. In our case we found 316 low-quality links coming from different pages on various link networks. (17% of their entire backlink profile)

To remove bad links, such as link networks, you should know something first.

Any of the following types of links can be both natural or artificial. The difference is how they were acquired in terms of link velocity and link distribution over the entire backlink profile of a site.

To identify if your backlink profile is unnatural, you should always compare your site to your competitors' and check for major discrepancies between the backlink profiles of those sites. I usually compare my site with the top 5 leaders in the industry and then compare my site with 5 other sites that are trying to break into the niche. There are always things that come up when doing such an in-depth analysis.

You should compare metric distributions, such as link and/or domain influence, link and/or domain trust flow, link and/or domain citation flow. These are only the basic comparisons that you can make. The more advanced ones are when you start to compare links classified by webpage type, link type, in content versus not in content links, link position and so on.

2. Footer Links

Footer links were totally legit 6 years ago, but they started to make a lot of mess because of websites who abused of this technique.

That's one of the reasons why Google placed site-wide links into the link schemes list. Those links can distort your analysis and do not present any value from an SEO point of view. Imagine if you have one link from one domain compared with 100 links from the same domain. First of all, the value of that single-domain-link is higher than each individual link coming from the same domain.

There was a question on the same issue on the Google Webmaster help forum:

Are sitewide backlinks considered good or bad by Google? Or do they just count as 1 link from the whole domain?

Matt Cutts answered very clearly:

From an algorithmic point of view, at some point, it becomes asymptotically diminishing returns. And it doesn't help you anymore.

Matt Cutts

Former head of the webspam team at Google

If they see a link form a domain they will count it as one, and if they see multiple links from the same domain, they might still count them as one.

From the manual point of view, you will receive a penalty, because Google doesn't trust those links and performs manual actions quite often.

In case you have a high number of footer links, you will definitely raise a red flag to Google. Usually, footer links are acquired from sites that:

sell links;

are involved in link exchange schemes;

have widgets or plugins installed (usually for SERP manipulation);

"powered by" links ( ex: WordPress);

partners of your business;

clients that link back to you.

If you find only a few links compared to your entire backlink profile then there is no real problem here. If instead, you get a long list of links, you might have a problem.

There are situations when Google missed to flag footer links. One example is for Godaddy, where they have almost 90% of their links coming from footer links. We checked their site with the cognitiveSEO tool after they were exposed by Yoast explaining the GoDaddy's spammy link building techniques. Every website created using a WordPress editor through GoDaddy has a footer text with a link such as "Powered by Do Daddy". The thing is that they are still following this practice, but now you have the option to remove that text by yourself.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Footer Links

cognitiveSEO.com allows you to select all the links that appear in blocks of links in the footer of the linking pages. For this site, we extracted 625 low-quality footer links (10% of their entire backlink profile).

There are options when you can easily spot the links that came from footer sections or groups of links. In the cognitiveSEO tool, you have a deep-link analysis where you can spot the inconsistency. Take, for example, the screenshot below:

On the site used for this example (www.addictinggames.com) we saw they had lots of links coming from Blog Posts or Forum Threads, which might not be bad (depending on the intent). But the alarming situation starts when you look at the number of links coming from groups of links: 8,024, which is a lot.

All those links must be reviewed individually and disavowed quickly otherwise, I hear the penalization alarm.

After a quick research in Site Explorer, we saw that the site suffered a massive drop in rankings because they were penalized. Since then, they haven't been able to regain their search visibility.

3. Blogrolls & Other Blocks of Links

Blogrolls were abused so much, that they tend to be very carefully analyzed by the Google algorithm nowadays.

This category includes both blogroll links and groups of links that do not fit into the blogroll pattern. Here is an example of a website that used to abuse the search engines and is not a blogroll. The domain uses widgets that are installed on various websites where webmasters get to place their link. Too many links that fit these patterns might be viewed as unnatural by the Google algorithm and you might get penalized for them. Some of those links can fall into the sitewide link category.

Make sure you don't have advanced link widget networks listed as site-wides, as they might get flagged faster. Like all of the other types of links presented in this guide, it all comes down to how they were integrated into your link profile.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Blogroll and Groups of Links

A couple of filters away, you will get another list of low-quality backlinks that might hurt your rankings. In our case, we got other 424 low-quality links.

We analyzed that specific backlink in Site Explorer to see some metrics. We discovered that the page and domain had low influence carrying lots of links (47,365) coming from only 45 referring domains. That is a clear sign of unnatural links.

The problem was the website had lots of other unnatural issues and their backlinks profile was filled with spammy links. 88% of their whole links are unnatural.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, all the unnatural links must be disavowed and then you should immediately submit the disavow file to Google to cut the connection with that spammy links that can dreadfully bury your website.

4. Site-Wide Links

Site-wide links will definitely hurt your rankings.

Site-wide links are another example of toxic backlinks. They are old news on the Google landscape. Site-wides are devalued and can hurt your rankings so easy. If your domain does not have the necessary authority and receives a couple of site-wides from some low-quality sites, your site will get penalized by Google.

The idea behind the site-wide links is quite simple. It is more important to have more root domains link to your domain than to have many links coming from fewer root domains that link to your domain.

There are site-wide links that will not hurt your rankings, and it all depends on the site the site-wide is put on. If that site is considered an authority and that site-wide link is not correlated with other factors such as high link velocity, then that site-wide could help you.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Site-Wide Links

Luckily, it's quite easy to discover these type of links with cognitiveSEO as it's a Sitewide Chart, dedicated to this matter.

You will get a chart with the distribution of sitewide links. If it is a high number, click on the pie and check those links individually. In our case, we got 21% of the whole backlink profile coming from sitewide links.

The website has lots of sitewide links that carry almost no value. Below you can see an example of a backlink for that website:

There are multiple problems with this link. Besides the fact it is sitewide, it is also hidden, written in white font. I had to highlight it to see the full text.
Note: A site-wide link is considered to be a link that is automatically replicated across a large number of pages from the same site. Do not missclassify a site-wide as 10 different links coming from 10 different articles on Techcrunch for example. Those are not considered site-wides. Our software has a built-in algorithm that matches different patterns and concludes whether a link is a TRUE SITE-WIDE or not.
5. Blog Comments

Blog comment spam evolved on the back of the search engines.

Comment spam is a form of spamdexing (keyword stuffing) and it has been around since the beginning of the internet. There are several tools that help the spammers post comments automatically with the final aim to reach higher rankings in the search engines. That is why most of the comments are marked as nofollow by the blogging platforms so that Google will not index them. Even so, spam commenting is a huge phenomenon and everyone that owns a blog knows how much comment spam they receive.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Blog Comment Links

You can easily find both nofollow and dofollow links that are coming from blog comments.

For a quick review of the whole list of links that come from blog comments, you can go straight to the Link Positioning chart and click on the Blog Comment bar. We found a website that focused on building links through this technique:

We looked through their links and found out the website took advantage of this black-hat technique and left spammy blog comments on websites that weren't even related to their website. Not to mention it used an anchor text that has a spammy appearance, considering the circumstances. The website is a free library of e-books and resources and the website they're linking to is about website development. Not quite related, I might add.

6. Forum Profile Links & Signatures

Forums are abused the same way blogs are.

Having people discuss around your site in forums is the most natural thing that can happen to a site. It means your site generated some buzz in its niche. But, if you are doing link building using fake forum profiles, signatures and posting content and links automatically on forums, this will appear in your backlink profile and could hurt your ranking when Google will flag it. These kinds of patterns can be easily identified by Google. Below is an example of an unnatural link that comes from a forum.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Forum Links

Again, cognitiveSEO makes it easy to identify links coming from forum threads. If you want to check signatures and profiles, you should search for Link Position " Short Paragraph of Text, Group of Links. You'll get a list of links as you can see in the next screenshot.

In our example, you can find a preview page with some link info. The link has no influence and nor does the domain.

In case you want a quick analysis, you go straight to the Link Positioning chart and review the links from the Blog Post or Forum Thread. The website we analyzed had a lot of links coming from this source. 15% of the whole backlink profile is coming from blog posts or forum threads.

7. Web Directory Links

Forget Web Directory submission services that promise hundreds of directory registrations.

Having too many links coming from web directories is not always a good sign. This might raise a flag to the Google algorithm. You do not need hundreds of directories to be listed on, only a few quality ones that are well known in your niche. If you have a high percentage of links coming from directory submissions (manually or automatically), that were created some time ago or are freshly added (it doesn't matter), you will raise the link velocity flag, and get penalized.

An example of a web directory links you can see in the next screenshot. Basically, it is a list with a short description of brands, with a title and a link.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Web Directory Links

If you get a long list and it represents a big percentage of your inbound link profile (similar to the next screenshot), then this might signal a problem that you need to investigate even further. cognitiveSEO monitors backlinks and evaluates the unnaturalness for the whole website by offering percentages for the unnatural links, suspect links and ok links, letting you know if you are in danger.

In case your website has lots of unnatural links and red areas (like the one above) you should use the disavow tool and cut the connection to your website from all the spammy links.

Out of curiosity we looked through the unnatural links and found lots and lots of links that came from spammy directories, filled with hundreds of outbound links, just like the one below. There you could see that the page had lots of other issues, such as low influence link, thin content, a high number of outbound links and so on. You should remove the link immediately.

8. Article Directory Links

Avoid cheap content!

This is the best advice you could get. Having too many links from article directories is a sign that something unnatural is going on. Article directories and the sites they linked the most, were already hit by Panda in the last few years. Below is one way to find your article directory links so that you can further investigate them.

Article directories, if not created following qualitative guidelines, can be potentially harmful.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Article Directory Links

Below you can see a print screen for the article directory links identify with our tool. We got 49% unnatural link profile out of their total unnatural links (23,594). Their total unnatural link profile is 87%.

The website received multiple hits from Google algorithm updates. This was easy to spot in their search visibility. In the last 5 years, they were hit by lots of penalizations from Google.

In cases like these, it is very important to disavow all the spammy links in bulk and clean the website. In 2018, a website shouldn't have such toxic links. Try to monitor your backlinks to never find yourself in this situation.

9. Anchor Text Distribution

Over optimized anchor text does not look natural at all!

Anchor text is either:

brand keywords (domain name keywords or the actual brand name);

money keywords;

navigational keywords (click here, website, source and so on).

In cognitiveSEO you can easily classify and review your anchor texts. You'll get an analysis as you can see below. A natural distribution of anchor text would look like this.

An artificial anchor text distribution looks like this:

If your anchor text is over optimized, you are likely to be hit by Google because most of the times commercial anchor texts carry unnatural links. Consider a natural anchor text strategy, collaborate with other brands and influencers. Create valuable content and offer qualitative services to get recommendations and good links.

Conclusion

I hope all the SEO tips and the step by step guide will help you identify the potentially toxic links that generated problems with the Google penalties. Use the cognitiveSEO tool to investigate your link data and get a comprehensive link audit. The tool shows all the data in one place, and monitors backlinks side by side with your competition.

Don't build links that can harm your website, even if they used to work. Now, they don't anymore.

Use these tactics to identify bad links and remove them before Google takes action and penalizes your site. The sad part is that black hat is bad for everyone, and it is hurting the internet. Be good, create quality and Google will love you.

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How to Identify and Remove Bad Backlinks That Kill Your Rankings

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Since the last Penguin 4.0 (Real-time) update, lots of things have changed in terms of quality backlinks. Bad backlinks have remained the same, though, even if they were created some time ago with no intent to harm a website, or there was an arranged negative SEO attack or maybe a spammy link building campaign, with the purpose to rank high & fast.

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How to identify good links and bad links during optimisation ?

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Good links will improve your search rankings and drive targeted organic traffic to your site, while bad links will get you into trouble.we can use any back link analysis tool eg sem rush to identify good and bad links

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If the website is set up solely for the purpose of linking other websites, then that is a bad link. It can easily be identified by a website having a ton of articles that lack all coherence. e.g.majority of the Wordpress sites linked to your website.

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Good links:
1. Come from web pages that are relevant to your page’s topic.
2. Come from trustworthy sites, not spam sites
3. Flow naturally with the content(contextual links)
Bad links:
1. Have over-optimized anchor texts(Ex: "Best doctor in NYC")
2. Come from websites that have low domain authority
I've mentioned the important points above but if you'd like to read more points in detail, you can follow this article's 'What Makes a Link Good?' part.

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can significantly impact your search performance - for better or worse.

MarketingSherpa's 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report found that 59% of companies have done external link building . Top brands, small businesses and bloggers are also into link building.
It's important to run a full and pinpoint both the good and bad links that are pointing to your site.
You know that the good links will impact your search performance in a positive way, while the bad ones can potentially harm your site.

When SEORanksUp surveyed 72 SEOs for its 2014 Ranking Factors - Rank Correlation study, the respondents agreed that the link popularity of a specific page accounts for 22.33% of Google's ranking factors, while trust/authority of the host domain represents 23.87%.

In the past, you could get away with any kind of links. Google frowned at bad links from the beginning, but they didn't have a system for fishing out culprits. It's a different ball game now.

The Panda update redefined content quality. The Penguin update made it clear that Google prefers earned links over built links.

After reading this article, you'll know how to get the right links - the links that'll improve your search rankings. Let's get started.

What is Backlink Analysis?

If you care at all about SEO, it's vital to run a backlink analysis of the sites you'd like to get links from.

This kind of analysis is a detailed examination of the structure of links , both external and internal .
Good links will improve your search rankings and drive targeted organic traffic to your site, while bad links will get you into trouble.
Backlink Analysis Tools

The purpose of any backlink analysis tool is to show you the keywords, links and authority of sites you intend to link from.

Let's consider a few of the more popular backlink analysis tools:

Ideally, you should use the Ahrefs Site Explorer to dig into any site you'd like to get good links from.

i). Go ahead and click the "Site Explorer" tab. Then input the site URL (e.g., bloggingwizard.com) into the search box. Click the orange "search" button:

ii). Analyze the link profile. Study the results carefully and decide whether your intended link will be good or bad based on the analysis:

Next, check the anchor texts to determine whether the site is over-optimized or safe for getting good links.

Note: If you find a lot of exact match keywords as anchor texts, it's a sign that sooner or later the site may undergo a manual penalty. So look for sites that have a good mix, including branded anchor texts. (e.g., http://problogging.net).

2). SEMrush: This backlink analysis tool is a good choice when you want to deploy a broad SEO and content marketing campaign.

Here's how to use SEMrush:

i). Go to SEMrush homepage. Input your competitor (or any site) URL you want to check for its link profile, then click the "SEARCH" button:

ii). Analyze the organic traffic data and total backlinks:

Finally, check the branded vs. non-branded keywords and look at the competitors' sites for additional sources to get relevant authority links.
If you want to access more backlink analysis tools, the resources below will be helpful:
What Makes a Link Good?

More than likely, you've been advised to "only" get good links.

SEO experts will show you how important good links are and why you need them. But, not much has been said about what makes a link good.

That's because good links aren't easy to get.

Imagine how much it would cost you to get an authority link from Business Insider , or the White House . That single backlink would definitely boost your search rankings, but how on earth would you get it?

In the same vein, the easier it is to get a backlink, the lesser value it will probably have. This is a fact. It's easy to get a link from forums, because all you need do is reply to a thread, and, if the rooms aren't strictly moderated, your link will stay up.

So let's consider a few factors that make a link good. We can use these metrics to figure out which links are worth our time:

1. Good backlinks come from web pages that are relevant to your page's topic: The first metric that you can use to determine a good link is the page's relevance, compared to your page's topic.

Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger , a content marketing site, was recently interviewed at The Rise To The Top . The audiences of both blogs are closely related, so a link to Copyblogger was relevant.
Aside from improving your rankings, the source of your link can also affect conversions.
Relevant backlinks have been an important part of an optimized page for years now.

Let's say that you own a travel site and you've created a guide on the best places to visit in Dubai. You want to build links to this web page. Where do you begin?

You've got a lot of possibilities. But, if your links come from another travel site for that region of the world, that would be awesome, because they're relevant to your guide. If it's difficult to get such links, then aim for pages and sites that are at least relevant to "travel."

So a link from CNN's travel page is more relevant than one from a news article on Business Insider.
Before you build a link from any web page, ask yourself "will this audience benefit from my link?" Relevance will continue to be a future trend in search ranking factors.
If you're a social media expert and you built a link from an accounting software comparison site, will your audience benefit from that link? Possibly, but I doubt it.

Quick Tip: If you want to do guest blogging to build authority links, but there aren't many blogs in your niche that accept guest posts, you can bridge the topic.

Let's say you run a real estate site. You could still guest blog on internet marketing related blogs.

Simply bridge your topics and come up with compelling titles and case studies. You can write articles on these titles and submit to email marketing, social marketing, SEO, or CRO blogs:

Case Study: How I Increased My Real Estate Blog's Rankings by 97%

How a Real Estate Expert Used Twitter Marketing to Drive Referral Traffic

7 Simple Methods I Used to Boost My Conversion Rate by 34%

2. Good backlinks come from trustworthy sites, not spam sites: Are your backlinks from trustworthy sites? Keep in mind that the TrustRank of referring web pages is very important.

The reason is simple: Wikipedia is a trustworthy site, not a spam site.

O ne of the reasons why people lose their rankings when Google throws out a big update is because their links are not trusted. Your web pages may be highly ranked for the moment, but will that last?

Google trusts some sites more than others. If Google doesn't trust your site, from unscrupulous people who build to your site will affect your search performance.

In simple terms, here's how it works:

When you're building links, don't be too focused on domain names with a high PageRank (PR), because PR is no longer the best metric.
It's because his site is trustworthy and Google knows it.
What was the result? Nothing. His rankings weren't penalized one bit. That's not because Brain is a close personal friend of Matt Cutts.

Trust isn't something you earn overnight. It comes from consistently demonstrating your relevance and trustworthiness.

Let's say you own a site that you want to build links to and you're given the opportunity to choose between two options:

Option 1: Earn 1 link from university.edu, 1 link from BBC.co.uk

Option 2: Earn 5 links from different blogs

Personally, I'd prefer Option #1 - 1 link from university.edu, and 1 other link from BBC.co.uk - because those links have high TrustRank.

3. Links inside the content: Did you know that the location of a link on a page can affect the SEO value of it?

It gets even better when the referring page is trustworthy and relevant. Google perceives contextual links from relevant sites as significantly valuable, and will reward you accordingly.

may come in the form of external or internal links. Yes, you can use guest posting to drive your white hat SEO campaign , but be aware that links from guest posts - especially in an author bio or author profile area - may not be as valuable as a contextual link on the same page.

To be safe, aim for contextual links - i.e., links from within the content. Contextual links that point to your web page like the one below are good links, and will positively influence your search performance:

Google has evolved as a search engine company. Its recent algorithm changes are upgrades that provide better search results to users, based on context as well as content.

When search engines crawl web pages, they identify links and consider the text around the link.

For example, if you linked to your page using "Apple iPhone," the Googlebot wants to know how relevant the anchor link is to the context of the page.

Are there related words that indicate you were actually referring to the iPhone? You'd reasonably be expected to at least mention other related products, such as Apple's iPad or iMac, or to talk about Steve Jobs and how his designs evolved.

TechCrunch knows how to link out to authority sites in a natural way. If the post is about Facebook, it'll naturally mention words related to that site.

In the example below, instead of just linking out to "Hidden Chats," TechCrunch placed other related words in context (before and after the anchor) - "top messaging apps," "million users," etc. These words are relevant to online chatting.

4. Links that flow naturally with the content: When I first started out as a content writer, my major challenge was writing naturally. It requires creativity, experimentation and a willingness to learn and work hard.

Take a look at the paragraph below, tell me: does the link flow smoothly into the content?

This link and its context are too promotional. It doesn't provide any value. Instead, it just sings the praises of the lead generation service. This kind of spammy link could get you into trouble.

5. Links from long-form content are worth more: It's no longer a question: long-form content drives organic traffic and tends to rank higher than shorter articles.

If you get a link from long-form content, it'll pass stronger juice and improve your rankings, compared to a 300-word article that doesn't provide much value.

Naturally, longer content can dig deeper into a topic, addressing every part and is likely prefered to "powerful" short articles.

Seth's blog posts may be short (sometimes less than 100 words), but his bestselling books are in-depth, rich, and thought-provoking. His classic All Marketers Are Liars has 240 pages.

Want to take a guess at how many authority web pages I link out to in my posts on average? Over 40 - all of them relevant and useful. Do people click those links? Sure they do, especially when they links appear natural.

6. Dofollow and nofollow links combined: Make all your links dofollow, because they'll improve your search rankings, right?

You also need some nofollow links in order to make the links look natural, authoritative and relevant.

There's been a lot of disagreement on this point.

Matt Cutts said that t oo many dofollow links from unrelated sites can harm your rankings, but too many nofollow links will not . The attribute rel="nofollow" is usually contained in the link tag itself.

Invest in both types of links, but more on dofollow if you want improved rankings. Here's a typical example from Neila Walker :
So it's worth it to invest in nofollow links.
As it stands now, Google hasn't stipulated a ratio for both dofollow and nofollow links.

Google may not count it as good link immediately. But, as soon as people start clicking on it and engaging with the content there, Google will perceive the link as relevant and good.

to check the domain authority of a page. Just input the site URL into the search box and click the search button on the right.

Next, you'll see the domain and page authority:

What Makes a Link Bad?

A good link follows Google's guidelines. A bad link does not.

A bad link is simply one that violates Google's guidelines . Consequently, it can lead to Google penalties . You should look out for signals when building links, no matter where the links are coming from.

Here are ways you can recognize bad links:

Why would hundreds of over-optimized links come from a single root domain?

2. Links coming from unrelated sites or pages: I mentioned this earlier. If your links are coming from unrelated sites or pages, they'll be regarded as bad links.

If you're an internet marketing expert, don't try to get links from fitness blogs, because they're not related.

However, if you're interviewed by a fitness expert, you should use your brand name as anchor text. That's because anchor text of external links to the page affects how Google will perceive your link.

3. Dofollow site-wide and footer links: When you've got unrelated links to an external site, Google may slap a manual penalty on your site.

In his words, "sitewide links do happen." It makes sense, since most sites have static pages for things like a privacy policy, copyright notices, etc.

But when Google finds offtopic site-wide and footer links , that may raise red flags. In its basic form, it just looks manipulative.

For example, if the purpose of your site is to deliver "biology lessons," it'd be off-topic to link out to a forex trading site in your footer or sidebar.

Bottom line: Get links from a domain with at least . Links from sites with lower scores may be counted as bad.

5. Links from article directories: Article directories used to be very popular, up until around three years ago.

Google frowns upon low-quality content That's why article directories aren't right for you. They're known as content mills with little or no value in their content.

Google, through Matt Cutts, said

You should not submit articles to large content repositories such as ezine.com, ezinearticles.com, articlecity.com, etc.

More than likely, a link from an article directory will be unnatural. Google is well aware that authors use these directories for different purposes and could repurpose the same content on 10 or more article directories.

6. Backlinks with over-optimized anchor texts: Plain and simple: over-optimized anchor texts can negatively affect your search traffic and rankings.

Links coming from over-optimized anchors are dangerous. The percentage of exact match anchor texts that resulted in a Penguin penalty was higher than that of other anchor texts.

In the past, over-optimization was the way site owners and SEOs improved rankings. But it definitely doesn't work that way anymore. A ny manipulative means of getting links is SEO suicide.
To achieve better links and stay off Google's Penguin radar, you need to distribute your anchor texts between exact match, phrase, brand name, keyword branded, etc.
Back in April 2012 , Google launched the over-optimization penalty . It completely de-indexed sites that had excessive anchor text stuffing, link spamming and other bad SEO practices.

To be honest with you, I don't really care about anchor texts. When I write my posts, I just make sure each sentence flows well and makes sense. If the anchor text I've written flows smoothly with the rest of the post, then I keep it. If not, I rewrite it.

Trying to keep up with all the anchor text rules may not be an outright waste of time, but it'll only take you so far. You want results, not rules.

So focus on creating the right content and let the anchors fall in as natural as possible. Just like this link I got from Entrepreneur.com:

On my Wikipedia profile page, my sites are linked using branded anchor texts. Considering that some of my posts were referenced as well, it makes sense to leverage brand names which redirect to the homepages.

8. A link from a penalized site: This is obvious. I f you get a link from a penalized site, it's a bad link.
Steer clear of those blogs.
Penalized sites are not indexed by Google. So your links will be wasted and could even affect your rankings in the long run.

You can check if a site is still indexable or active with this search string: site:thesiteurl.com:

On the homepage, input the site URL that you intend to get links from - for example, through guest blogging, link building, email outreach, etc. Then, click the button to check:

Next, see the status of the site:

Conclusion
What other strategies do you use to determine good and bad links? What steps are you taking to build only good links?
The audience that you're targeting has to benefit from your content, keywords and links if you ever want Google to reward you.

In some ways, Google is like a toddler that needs to be spoon-fed. All you've got to do is lead Googlebot by the hand through in-depth and high value content and you'll prove that you deserve the

The more good links you have pointing to your web pages, the better and more authoritative Google will perceive your web pages to be. After all, good links only come to useful sites that users are interested in.

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How to Determine if a Link is Good or Bad

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Links can significantly impact your search performance - for better or worse. Regardless of whether you choose to use black hat or white hat link building techniques, you should be prepared for the potential consequences. MarketingSherpa's 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report found that 59% of companies have done external link building.