Toxic backlinks: are they real, and can they hurt your site?

The first time an SEO tool told me a chunk of my backlinks were "toxic," it came with a red number and a button to build a disavow file.

That's a scary combination. It makes it sound like something is actively hurting your site and you need to act now.

So is it?

Where the word "toxic" comes from

Google doesn't use the word. You won't find a toxicity score in Search Console, and there isn't one in Google's documentation.

"Toxic backlinks" is a label some SEO tools invented. Each tool looks at your links, checks them against its own list of warning signs, like spammy anchor text, low-quality sites, odd countries, lots of outbound links, and gives each one a score.

That's the tool's opinion. It can be a useful opinion. But it's not Google's, and it's not a measure of damage.

Keep in mind that some of those tools also sell the fix. A scary number is good for business.

What Google actually does with spammy links

Google's December 2022 link spam update said its systems now neutralize the impact of unnatural links. In plain words: Google tries to make spammy links count for nothing, instead of counting them against you.

That's why the junk links every site picks up, the stats sites, the scrapers, the "Get higher rankings with" pages, don't need cleaning up. I wrote about those in Why are spam sites linking to me?

What about negative SEO?

Negative SEO is the idea that a competitor could point thousands of spammy links at your site to get it penalized.

It's the obvious next question. If bad links can hurt, can't someone just send you bad links?

That's exactly why Google built its systems to ignore them. If junk links could sink a site, anyone could take down a competitor for a few dollars. A system that neutralizes those links instead of punishing you makes that attack mostly pointless.

Can it ever happen? The cases people point to are rare, hard to prove, and usually tangled up with other problems on the site. For a normal small site, it's not something I'd lose sleep over.

When spammy links really are a problem

There's one case where you should pay attention: links you, or someone you hired, built on purpose.

Google's spam policies describe the things that cross the line: buying links that pass ranking credit, excessive link swaps, automated link building, keyword-stuffed links in footers and widgets.

If you bought a package of 500 links, or hired an SEO who did, those links aren't random noise. They're a pattern. That's the situation where a manual action can happen, and where the disavow tool makes sense. More in Should you disavow backlinks?

What's actually worth watching

Instead of a toxicity score, here's what I keep an eye on:

• Sudden floods. Hundreds of new linking sites in a week, all with the same anchor text. Unusual, and worth a look.
• Your own link building. Every link you paid for or arranged. Is it still live? Is it on a real site with real readers?
• Manual actions. In Search Console, under Security & Manual Actions. If it says "No issues detected," Google hasn't flagged you.
• Your traffic. If your clicks are steady or climbing, your links aren't hurting you.

How DR Buddy handles it

DR Buddy doesn't give your links a toxicity score, on purpose.

When you run a backlink scan, we sort the sites into worth monitoring, not sure and probably junk, with a plain reason for each. The junk pile starts folded away. You can ignore it in one click, and you don't need to do anything else.

Then you monitor the links that matter, so you find out if one disappears or switches to nofollow. That's a much better use of your attention than a red number.