How do I check for toxic backlinks, and what should I do about them?

What “toxic” actually means, and what it costs

A backlink is another site linking to yours. For most of Google’s history links were the main way it judged whether a site mattered, which is why people bought them, traded them and built networks of sites to manufacture them. The links that hurt you are the ones that look manufactured: they exist to pass ranking value, not because anyone thought a reader would want to click — and it does not matter to Google whether you built them, a past agency built them in your name, or a competitor built them to make it look that way.

The word “toxic” comes from the tools, not from Google. A tool assigns a score to every link and colors the high ones red, and the score is a guess built from patterns — the linking site’s size, its topic, how many other sites it links to, whether it has any traffic. The score is useful for sorting a long list and useless for deciding, because it does not say why a link is on the list or what to do about it. Read the list for the patterns below instead, and give each one its action.

What a bad profile costs is a manual action for unnatural links: a person at Google finds the pattern, the notice lands in Search Console, and the site drops for the terms that pay until the links are removed or disavowed, a reconsideration request is filed and Google gets around to reviewing it — weeks to months. The reason to do this work now, on a quiet afternoon, is that the same work under a manual action is done with the phone not ringing.

Where to see every link to your site

Two sources, and you want both.

• Google Search Console. Links → External links. Top linking sites shows the domains, top linked pages shows which of your pages they point at, and the export gives you the list Google is actually working from. It is free, it is Google’s own data, and it is the first place to look. It is a sample rather than every link, and it is updated on Google’s schedule, not yours.
• One backlink tool. Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and the DataForSEO index our own audit reads all crawl the web themselves and see links Search Console leaves out, and they show when a link appeared and when it vanished. You do not need more than one. What you need is the export — every referring domain with its link count, the anchor text, whether the link is followed, and the first-seen date — and its alert for new links turned on, so the next burst reaches your inbox the week it starts.

Put both exports in one spreadsheet, one row per referring domain. A local business typically has somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred domains. That is an afternoon, not a project — and it is an afternoon better spent now than under a manual action.

The four patterns that can earn a manual action

Ignore the tool’s color. Read the list for these, and mark every domain that matches:

1. Links somebody paid for. A past agency’s “link building package,” a directory that charged for a followed link, a guest post on a site that sells them. If the link is followed and money changed hands, it is against Google’s policies and it is the kind of link a manual action is issued for. It is removed or disavowed first.
2. Networks. Twenty sites with the same template, the same registrar, the same handful of topics, each linking to a few hundred businesses. They are built to sell links, their links come and go together, and there is nobody at them to email — they go on the disavow list by domain.
3. Sitewide links. Your name in the footer or sidebar of another site, repeated on every one of its pages, so a single deal shows up as thousands of links. Legitimate when it is your web designer’s credit or a partner; a flag when the site has nothing to do with you and the anchor is a sales phrase.
4. Exact-match anchors in bulk. Real people link with your business name, your URL, or “this company.” Fifty links that all say “roofing contractor Nashville” did not happen on their own — and whoever built them, they read as a scheme.

Everything else — the scrapers, the “top 100 sites” lists, the foreign-language directories, the odd forum — goes in its own column with a decision beside it: the link-seller and scraper pages that list thousands of sites have nobody to ask and go on the disavow list by domain; the real sites — the local paper, a supplier, a directory that checks licenses — are the links worth protecting, and never go on it.

Links you never asked for

A pile of junk links that appeared in one week, with the same commercial anchor on all of them, is a burst aimed at you — a competitor, a disgruntled vendor or a bot trying to make your profile read like a bought campaign. It is handled the week it appears: export it with first-seen dates, check Security & Manual Actions, send removal requests where a person can act, and put the networks on the disavow list by domain, so that if a manual action ever follows the evidence that the links were not yours already exists. What a competitor can do beyond links — reviews, your profile, your pages, your ads — has its own post.

One thing that looks like an attack and is worse: a hacked site with spam pages injected into it, which generates links and rankings for terms you have never sold. That is a security emergency fixed on the site first — the Security issues report in Search Console, a clean backup, every password changed — not a link problem to disavow your way around.

Building the disavow file right

Google’s rule for the disavow tool is one sentence: use it for a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links that have caused a manual action or are likely to. A bought package and a burst aimed at you are both that case. Its caution — that used wrongly the tool can harm a site — is about the other kind of mistake: a domain you disavow is a domain whose links no longer count, including a real one you misjudged in a hurry. So the file is built precisely, not broadly, and it is built now.

The order:

1. Removal first. Email the sites and ask for the link to be taken down, today. Many will not answer. Keep the date and the message, because a reconsideration request asks what you did.
2. A plain text file, one line per entry. Disavow by domain (domain:example.com) rather than by page, because a network that linked from one page will link from another. Read every line: the link networks, the link-seller pages, the bought guest posts — never the local paper, the supplier or the chamber.
3. Upload it in Search Console’s disavow tool for the property, with Security & Manual Actions open so you know what you are preventing or lifting. It replaces any file already there, so keep a copy.
4. If there is a manual action, file the reconsideration request with the log of removals and the file. Be plain about what happened and who did it, and check the report weekly until it is lifted.

Then the two things that give value back while you wait: redirect the links that point at pages of yours that no longer exist, and email the real sites whose links have vanished. Google re-evaluates on its own schedule, and the recovery from a link penalty is measured in weeks to months — one more reason the removals and the file go out the week the list is read.

The links that actually move a local business

The links that matter for a home service business are few and boring: the local paper that covered your project, the supplier who lists its installers, the association you belong to, the chamber of commerce, the charity you sponsored, the trade directory that checks licenses. Those are earned once, they last, and they are the ones the cleanup protects — which is the reason the list is read by hand. Once the bad links are off the record, the time goes to the Business Profile, the reviews and the service pages.

Our own backlink audit reads the list exactly this way: every referring domain, the ones that fail the rules with the reason beside each, in tiers — never a toxicity number — and every flag paired with its action: the removal requests with a dated log, the disavow file by domain for what stays up, the reconsideration request when there is a manual action. It is part of the SEO work, and it can be bought on its own.