Transcript
Hi guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation, your site's going to get spammy and low-level links, no matter if you're trying to get them or not. The reason why the conversation is important is there's a lot of literature out there, and rightfully so, that talks about ensuring that you don't do toxic or spammy link building. And so a lot of people can be a little bit on guard about getting those to their site and they can be a little bit understandably concerned when they find them pointing to their site. So I want to talk about that today. Before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today, which is a Darjeeling black tea. I don't know much about black teas. All I know is that black teas are the main kind of base where most boba tea drinks and especially like milk tea boba and black tea, the way you go.
I used to drink black tea so much when I was younger. I moved away from it recently and have gone to other teas, but it's always a little bit nice to get a burst of nostalgia. It's just always nice to taste something that used to drink a lot in the past, but let's get brewing and get chatting.
So again, let me just say that the big concern is if you have a lot of spammy and toxic links, you can be penalized by Google. And that's a big thing. And even from my own firm, we have a very hard line about not working with spammy and toxic websites. We just don't really entertain that. We don't see the value in it. We do see the value in it, but we don't like the risk of it. You can get penalized, you can get an algorithm update that really hurts your site. So we just really avoid that. Over the years I've met individuals who have really taken that to heart, where they understand spammy and low-level links are not good. Therefore, what they will do is they'll often say, "Hey, my site, we're getting some spam and a low-level links. We didn't build them, but we need to get rid of them because Google's going to penalize them." So let's annotate that kind of conversation.
First things first, to get penalized for getting spammy and toxic links. It needs to be not one-offs. There needs to be a large pattern and your portfolio looks must be large of toxic and spammy links. So if you're getting like 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, I wouldn't really worry about that.
You know, it's not the biggest deal. It's more of like you're in the hundreds to thousands of spammy and toxic links. And the hundreds of thousands are a majority of your link portfolio. So you're lucky if you're in this field, if you're like this. But if you have 5,000 referring domains and 500 of them are spammy or toxic, that's only like what 10%. It's not a big deal. It's more of like you're in the 40 to 50% that you need to be concerned. Well saying that if you were concerned on spammy or toxic links going to your site, it's really only if it's a majority. If your site is small, like you only have a 20 referring domain, then 10 of them are toxic or spammy. I still wouldn't be that concerned because you're still at the kind of start. It's more of you getting to a hundred plus. And it's a majority, that's when I would be concerned. So that's number one.
Two, it's going to happen. I work on many sites and we get spammy and toxic links all the time without trying. And that's just because there are sites out there who have their own crawlers who are trying to add links to their own site. And you know, you're not doing anything. In that sense, I wouldn't worry about them. I wouldn't even worry about disavowing them, especially if you're in a low level. I have gone on another video and I've had conversations with other SEOs and if you go online, you'll read about this, I'm not the biggest fan of using the disavow tool. I really only like to use that tool if we find that there's a penalty or there's a huge impending concern that we have.
But again, if you have 50 referring domains and you have 10 spammy or toxic links that you're unaware of, I wouldn't even bother disavowing them. How I normally advise clients, if you are concerned, the best thing we can do is just build high quality links to outweigh those spammy toxic. The spam and toxic links are going to happen regardless. So don't worry too much about safeguarding your site or disavowing, focus more on getting high quality links and it will outweigh the bad ones anyways. So if you're concerned about your website, having spam or toxic links, don't worry about unless you fit what I said in the beginning. You have such a large percentage of your site having that, that it would be a concern. So therefore, hopefully that helps you and understanding how to balance the spammy or toxic links.
Again, I believe that you need to have a large percentage of your site having it, to be if any concern. Other than that, don't really worry too much about disavows or fixing or getting rid of the links. I would just focus on link building high quality links, either through digital PR or organic link building and that will fix it in itself. You know, you don't need to do extra to fix those one-offs or these random ones that come to your site. So hopefully that will allay some fears for you guys who are watching this, who are concerned that you're getting some bad links and everything. That's kind of like what I advise law clients who get a little bit jumpy. So hopefully it'll help you. If you guys found that video valuable, please like and subscribe. Hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks everybody.