Google Penalties Research:Detecting and Dealing with Unnatural Inbound Links

Demystifying Google Penalties for Toxic Inbound Links

Usually, getting a manual penalty from Google comes as a result of utilizing black-hat SEO tactics and not making sure a website's backlink profile is natural and adheres to Google’s guidelines.

Among the most common triggers for a Google link penalty are unnatural outbound and inbound links. Unnatural links are also known as “harmful”, “spammy”, or, as we call them at SEMrush, “toxic”. Both inbound and outbound links can get your website penalized.

Outbound links are located on your website and point to other websites. You can get a penalty for outbound links for linking to another website the way that goes against Google’s guidelines — for creating a “pattern of artificial, deceptive, or manipulative inbound links”, as Google calls it. This type of penalty has its own pitfalls and deserves to be covered in a separate article. 

By the same token, inbound links are the links at external domains pointing to your website or its specific pages. These links constitute your backlink profile, and you should always keep an eye on them.

We have a dedicated metric, Toxic Score, that shows how good each inbound link in your profile is. 

In a recent study, we used our Backlink Audit tool to collect data for over 830 backlink profiles of SEMrush and industry forums users whose websites had been hit by penalties during the past 2 years.

Our goals were the following: 

• Spot the factors and correlations that trigger penalties.

• Identify how frequently each penalty case occurs.

• Put the precision of our Backlink Audit’s algorithm to the test when assessing backlink profiles and labeling links as toxic.

• Find ways to enhance the tool to provide the best solution for tackling Google penalties and avoiding them in the future.

• Create a basis for a step-by-step guide that will help you to recover from Google penalties and build a strong backlink profile. 

A comprehensive list of factors and their combinations that cause manual penalties based on link “unnaturalness” is not completely obvious. It makes it difficult for SEO professionals and webmasters to detect the exact weak spots of a backlink profile.