Stop Your Outbound Links Murdering Your SERPs!

We all know that both on-page and off-page internet marketing tactics can help boost your Google rankings. We also know that there are on-page factors that can get you banned from Google – things like copying someone else’s content, keyword stuffing, etc. Did you know, though, that there are off-page factors that can also get you kicked off the world’s biggest search engine? If you link to ‘bad neighborhoods’ … even if you link at a time when the web page is perfectly respectable, but the domain later gets marked as a link farm, a spammer, a keyword stuffer, etc, you could get banned by Google. So how do you find these nefarious sites that could undo all your good SEO work? Follow our guide.

Those nefarious site links can really make your rankings hurt...

1. Check out Bing.com

The lord and master of most of our computers, Microsoft, has created an awesome tool for checking whether you’re linking to spam – if you use it with a bit of ingenuity. You can use the ‘linkfromdomain’ command (without the apostrophes) to check whether links that originate in your domain point to spam.

2. Make a list of probable spam terms

Start off with drug names, pharmaceutical misspellings, casino, poker, over 50 life insurance deals, home finance, home equity, 4u, bllogspot, etc. Check out the lists (1 and 2) of words that trigger spam email filters to create a more extensive list.

3. Search for two or three words in conjunction with the linkfromdomain command

So you might type “linkfromdomain:webmarketinngexperts.com.au gambling casino poker” into Bing. Starting off by targeting several words at a time helps cut down the sheer number of pages that might use the term innocently.

4. If you’re concerned, do individual word searches

Alternatively, you can also search for individual terms that are far less likely to ‘innocently’ appear on web pages. Spam filter words like ‘Shemale’ or ‘lesbian’ are good examples.

5. Check out the sites and decide whether you want to keep the link

In many cases, instances of these words will be innocent. In some they will not – and better you find out than Google! Get rid of anything shady looking ASAP, or you could face an uphill battle to get your Google ranking back.