If you have toxic links pointing to your website, just ignore them

If you run auditing tools on your website, they’ll often find “toxic” links (from spammy sites) that link to yours, and advise you to work to get rid of those links. While those links won’t do you any good, they’re not worth worrying about.

Generally speaking, your best course of action when you find those links is to just ignore them. I know it feels like you have to do something about them, but you really don’t. As Google’s John Mueller clarified, you’re welcome to disavow them using a tool like Google Search Console, but you don’t need to.

Specifically, John said two things. First, in a response to someone showing a list of toxic links from a tool, John said:

You should just ignore that. Some tools make assumptions about Google that just aren’t correct.

Further into the conversation, John said:

We don’t have a notion of “toxic” links.

Google is pretty smart. They know who the spammers are, and they just don’t count those links for anything. You can use their Disavow tool if you want, but you run the risk of making things worse, and you’re best to leave well enough alone.

As with many things in life, you might feel like you need to do something to help, but just leaving it alone and moving on to better things is the way to go.

Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on January 18, 2022.