How to Remove Bad Backlinks: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

Are you struggling to increase your website’s search rankings even after creating great content? Maybe your site might have bad backlinks that are preventing your website to get more search traffic.

Bad or toxic backlinks can hurt your website rankings.

If you’re looking to find how to remove bad backlinks from your site, this beginner’s guide is exclusively for you.

Maintaining a good backlink profile can really:

• improve your site’s overall traffic
• grow your website’s search rankings
• boost your site’s organic visibility and so on

So let’s get into the details of how to get rid of bad backlinks from your site.

Quick note: Semrush is the MOST useful to finding and removing toxic links from your website. Use the following link to try it for free.

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How to Remove Bad Backlinks: The Beginner’s Guide for 2025

What Are Bad Backlinks?

Bad backlinks are links from spammy or low-quality websites.

These toxic links can do more harm than good. Why?

Because they can signal to search engines like Google that your website is also spammy or low quality. That’s how Google punishes websites that contain a ton of toxic links.

You can consider a backlink as a bad or toxic link when it is coming from any of the following sources;

• Sites that are penalized by Google
• Adult content sites
• Illegal content sites
• High spam blog directories
• Automatic link generate sites

Bad or toxic backlinks are the links that come from “unnatural” and “irrelevant” sources which add no real value to your website. In fact, toxic backlinks can hurt your website search rankings.

To put it simply, good backlinks can increase your website’s DA (domain authority) while bad backlinks can reduce your site’s authority. It’s as simple as that.

Here are a few reasons to remove bad links:

• Bad links pointing to your site can really hurt your website’s organic rankings
• Bad links can get your site penalized by Google
• Bad links give you a high spam score for your site
• They can literally affect your rankings, traffic, sales, and so on

So how do you find toxic links on your website? Let’s talk about some of the best bad backlink checker tools now.

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How to Find & Remove Toxic Backlinks

There are a ton of backlink checker tools that you can use to find bad or toxic backlinks on your website.

If you’re looking for a powerful SEO tool, we recommend Semrush. We’ve been using the same tool since 2016 to clean up bad links from our site’s backlink profile.

In case you’re wondering, Semrush is the #1 SEO toolkit used by over 10 million people around the world.

It also offers a free trial for 14 days which can be helpful for you to easily clean toxic links from your site.

Activate Semrush Pro 14-Day Free Trial (worth $129.95)

Here’s how you can use Semrush to get rid of bad backlinks.

Log in to the Semrush dashboard. Go to Backlink Audit feature which you can see under the “Link Building” section. Once you’re in it, click the “Create project” button which looks like this;

Now, it will ask you to set up a backlink audit of your website. Here’s what it looks like;

Once you set up a backlink audit of your site, Semrush will show you a whole overview of your backlink profile.

Have a look;

See that? It also shows you all the toxic domains that are pointing to your site.

Here are some of the newly discovered toxic domains on our site.

As you can see above, you’ll notice the target toxic link’s source URL along with the Toxic Score (TS).

That’s how you can easily find a list of all the bad backlinks on your website.

The best part about using the Semrush Backlink Audit tool is that you can directly connect your Semrush account with Google Search Console and update your disavow file with just one click.

Here’s how you can disavow links using Semrush.

As you can see above, for every link, you’ll have an “Actions” button which you can use to easily move bad backlinks to Disavow section.

Here’s what it looks like (once you move toxic links to the Disavow section on Semrush);

As you can see above the status of Disavowed links. You can also improve Disavow links by integrating your domain with Google Search Console.

Make sure to move all the bad links you want to remove in your Disavow list. Then, you can see use the “Export to TXT” button to export your Disavow links. When you click on the export button, Semrush will convert your Disavow list into a properly formatted .txt file.

Here’s what it looks like;

In case you’re curious, how the whole process works in a nutshell;

• You’ll first add toxic backlinks to the Disavow tab on Semrush. Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool lets you easily find all the toxic backlinks and export them to the disavow list.
• Then you can choose whether to blacklist the specific URLs or the entire domain before exporting it to a .txt file
• The final step is to upload your file to Google’s disavow tool to remove them. It will show now as “Disavowed” once they’re removed successfully!

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How to Use Google Disavow Links Tool to Remove Bad Links?

Once you have your .txt file ready, go to the Google Disavow Tool and choose the property that you want to disavow links from.

Here’s what it looks like;

Use the “Upload disavow list” button to import the .TXT file you downloaded from Semrush Backlink Audit (that contains all your site’s toxic links).

That’s it, you’re done!

After uploading your website’s disavow file, you’ll have to wait up to 4 to 6 weeks before Google takes your file into account.

IMPORTANT: Here’s what Google has to say about using the Google Disavow tool. It is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution.

If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results.

We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site.

What should be considered while using Google Disavow link tool?

It is because your competitors may link to your site with bad neighbor links i.e spam links to badly hurt your SERPs or search results in Google. Bing had introduced this disavow link tool sometime back, and many bing users claimed to remove those spammy links from their sites.

What can Google Disavow Links tool do?

It is Google’s best spam reporting tool where you can suggest Google not to consider a few external links pointing to your sites.

That means if you think your site has a few spammy external links, then you can use the Google Disavow link tool to remove them by Google bots.

This way you have total control over your overall links that are pointing to your sites.

By using this Google disavow link tool, you’re helping Google to remove all the bad links to your site and also you’ll be controlling that Google punishing your site in the search engines in the future (for still containing bad links to your site!).

Caution: Google’s official blog itself says that, vast majority of sites do not need to use this tool in any way. If you’re not sure what the tool does or whether you need to use it, you probably shouldn’t use it.

Why? Few bloggers may download all their links to the sites in a .CSV or .DOC format from their webmaster tools. And they may use Google disavow tool to deny, this will result in Google denying ALL of your incoming links to your sites on their search results. How bad if this really happens?

So make sure to use Google disavow link tool ONLY if you strongly believe that your site is strongly affected by bad links pointing to your sites. And be aware of which links you’re disavowing from your site, better use a separate file like notepad to upload those links.

But what if you find a few unknown links pointing to your sites?

The simple answer is.. ignore them.

Use Google disavow link tool only if you’ve done black hat SEO tactics or any other Google unnatural link schemes. Or use the tool if you still think there are many bad sites linking to your sites even if you’ve done everything right according to Google quality guidelines.

If you use Google disavow links tool, how soon the bad links will be removed?

All of us know that… Google uses bots to crawl the pages on every site. So it takes a few days to re-crawl all the pages on your blog and if you’ve used Google disavow links tool to deny the bad links, it may take a few days to weeks to remove all the links which you were uploaded to this tool.

Usually it takes up to 6 months.

Quick note: The best part about removing spammy links from your site is that it helps you fight against Penguin updates. Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results, especially those who’re doing so by buying links or using spammy link networks.

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What’s the BEST way to deal with bad backlinks?

Here’s a quick tutorial to get rid of toxic links.

Step 1: Find all your website’s toxic backlink sources

The first step is to carefully find a list of all the backlinks to your website. As mentioned above, you can use tools like Semrush Backlink Audit to easily find all the bad links that are pointing to your site.

Step 2: Get in touch with the blog owners

Before using any advanced link removal techniques like the Google Disavow tool, it’s always a better idea to send an email to the appropriate website owners to remove your links.

Here’s what an email pitch looks like (when you’re connecting with website owners to remove your link from their sites).

Here’s another link removal template you can use;

Hi [NAME],

My name is [YOUR_NAME] and I’m running the website called [YOUR_WEBSITE]. I wanted to thank you for linking to our website from [URL_OF_THE_PAGE_LINKING_TO_YOU].

Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that it’s best to remove this backlink. Therefore, I will have to ask you kindly to remove this backlink from your site.

The link is located here: [URL_OF_THE_PAGE_LINKING_TO_YOU]

It links to [URL_OF_YOUR_SITE]

And it’s using the anchor text [ANCHOR_TEXT_USED_FOR_YOUR_LINK].

Thank you for your time.

Awaiting your positive reply.

Regards,

[YOUR_NAME]

Now the most important question. How can you even find blog owners’ information so you can ask for a backlink removal of your site?

Here are a few quick ways to get in touch with the bloggers.

• Reaching out on social media (you can look for their full name)
• Commenting on a blog post (most websites have blogs and allow comments)
• Searching the site owner’s name on Google

Now, you can send an email to the blogger and make the location of the link you want to remove. Try to make sure the blogger can find and remove your link in less than one minute. If you are not getting a reply in 5-10 days, send a follow-up email.

Step 3: Disavow everything else that you can’t remove

If you want to skip step 2, simply use the Google Disavow links tool to remove toxic links from your website which you’re going to discover below.

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FAQs on how to get rid of bad backlinks

Here are a few important questions you might want to know about removing spammy links from your site in 2025.

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Final Thoughts on Removing Bad Backlinks

No matter what niche you’re in, backlinks are an important part of SEO.

Finding and removing bad links is always a good thing for your site. If you suspect that a backlink is bad, you can use Google’s Search Console to disavow it.

That being said, Google disavows links tool is not a RESET button to remove all the bad links and to include only the best links on your site, but it’s a tool that can be helpful if you’ve done link building the bad way or if your competitors hurt you with too many bad links.

Hopefully, this detailed post helped you with how to remove bad backlinks from Google. Let us know if you still have any questions in the comments below.