Toxic Links: The Potential Negative Impact of the Wrong Strategy?

Digital Marketing
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If you build the wrong links and use risky black hat tactics, you run the risk of having toxic links in your backlink profile that could negatively affect your rankings and organic traffic.

We have explored this in detail in our guide to [running a backlink analysis and finding toxic backlinks, and this comes as highly recommended reading.

But you need to be aware that using the wrong tactics to build links can have disastrous consequences.

Things to Keep in Mind:

  • If Google determines that you are building links that violate its Webmaster Guidelines, you could see your site impacted by either a [manual action or by an algorithmic filter (most likely [Google Penguin), both of which can see your site drop rankings.
  • It is not unusual for it to take months, or even years, to recover from such a negative impact.
  • Time to recover is one thing to be aware of when balancing low effort, high-risk tactics with those that are lower risk but need a higher investment in effort.

The most successful strategies deliver sustained success, and you need to be using tactics that aren’t going to see your hard work impacted by a webspam filter or fall foul of a manual review.