<\/p>\n
Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about what to do about an increase in spammy backlinks that are perceived to have a negative impact on rankings. Mueller’s response showed what editors should focus on.<\/p>\n
The person who asked the question said that they had noticed an increase in spam backlinks and associated this with a negative impact on their rankings. They also said it was affecting their “overall credibility”.<\/p>\n
They didn’t explain what they meant by “overall credibility”, but maybe they were talking about a third-party site metric like domain authority.<\/p>\n
Here’s what the person asked:<\/strong><\/p>\n “I have noticed a significant increase in spam backlinks pointing to my website, and this is negatively affecting my search engine rankings and overall credibility of my site. Despite my best efforts, I am struggling to effectively remove those backlinks spam.<\/p>\n Can anyone provide guidance or suggestions on best practices and tools to remove spammy backlinks and restore the integrity of my website’s link profile? Any advice or suggestions would be helpful.”<\/p>\n Mueller responded that there is no need to do anything about “spam backlinks” because Google ignores them. He didn’t even suggest using the Disavow tool, a tool that tells Google to ignore specific links that a publisher is responsible for.<\/p>\n Mueller responded:<\/strong><\/p>\n “I strongly recommend focusing on other things – Google’s systems are very good at dealing with random spam links, but like users, they get stuck on websites that aren’t awesome. Make your site awesome instead of chasing those links.”<\/p>\n Third-party metrics do not provide information about how Google sees a website. They are just a third party opinion that can be used to measure one site against another.<\/p>\n My background in SEO goes back 25 years to a time when Google used to display a PageRank representation in the Google toolbar. I was an authoritative source of information relating data about the amount of links and whether a site was indexed or not. However, even Google’s PageRank tool did not accurately reflect a site’s ability to rank well.<\/p>\n Majestic’s Topical trust flow score<\/a> they are useful because they communicate the types of links flowing to a website and give an idea of \u200b\u200bwhat backlinks say about a site.<\/p>\n But other than that, a third-party “authority” metric is not something I’ve used and will never use. Many SEOs with long experience do not use these metrics.<\/p>\n Read the Reddit discussion:<\/strong><\/p>\nJohn Mueller answers the question about backlink spam<\/h2>\n
About “General Credibility”<\/h2>\n