To understand what makes a bad backlink, we first need to know how Google uses links in its algorithm.
Put simply, Google’s algorithm considers links to be a vote of confidence in a page’s content. The more relevant, quality backlinks a page has, the more evidence Google has that people find the page valuable and trustworthy.
This accumulation of positive “votes” can improve your site’s chances of ranking higher for relevant search terms. But this is only the case when incoming links are generated from high-quality sources.
Google has taken steps to reduce the value of links that is easy for website owners to earn.
The search engine actively ignores or penalizes links that it believes were built as part of a link scheme or designed to manipulate search engine rankings.
According to Google’s Search Essentials guidelines, any links that violate their policies are disregarded entirely or can even be considered spam.
All the types of low-quality backlinks mentioned in this article are those that meet this criterion. They’re links that anyone can generate with little effort.
So when deciding whether a link is good or bad, ask yourself whether anyone can get a link from the website with relative ease and at a low cost.
If the answer is yes, it will almost certainly have little or negative SEO value.
