Backlinks are links from other websites that point back to yours — it’s all in the name. They remain one of the most important elements of a successful SEO strategy: a natural network of links from trusted, relevant sources tells search engines that your site is worth ranking.
Not every backlink helps, though. Some links strengthen your authority and drive real referral traffic, while bad backlinks can drag your rankings down — or at best waste your time and budget.
In this guide, we’ll look at the main types of bad backlinks, how search engines treat them today, and how to clean up your link profile so your visibility and user experience improve.
Why search engines care about link quality
In the ongoing struggle between good backlinks and “evil” ones, the source is the deciding factor. Where a link comes from — and why it exists — is what determines whether it helps or hurts.
Why do search engines care in the first place? It mostly comes down to user experience.
Search engines like Google and Bing want people to come back again and again, and that only happens when results are genuinely useful. The user gets the answer they were looking for and finds trustworthy sites that actually solve their problem.
Links play a big role in that. Every backlink acts as an endorsement: when reputable sites link to a page, it signals trust and authority. But an endorsement only counts if the endorser is credible. That’s why Google’s spam-fighting systems — from the original Penguin update, now baked into the core algorithm, to today’s automated link-spam detection — work continuously to identify manipulative links and either devalue them or, in serious cases, penalize the sites involved.
What makes a backlink good — or bad?
Good backlinks are earned, not manufactured. They come from relevant, informative websites; they exist because your content adds value; and they help the reader understand a topic better. Sites that publish genuinely useful content for their audience are the source of good backlinks.
Bad backlinks, on the other hand, get flagged by search engines and can lower your site’s visibility in search results. They are artificial, forced, irrelevant, or outright spammy. They exist to manipulate rankings rather than to help a reader — and search engines have become very good at telling the difference.
4 types of bad backlinks to keep an eye out for
When you’re working on your website’s SEO, keep in mind that there are several types of bad backlinks you don’t want in your profile.
As a rule of thumb, avoid anything that feels disreputable or too good to be true. SEO is a long-term process — it takes time and doesn’t happen overnight. As you review your link profile, these are the four most significant types of backlinks to avoid:
1. Links from sites that seem spammy
Spam is hard to define precisely, yet most of us recognize it on sight: irrelevant ad-stuffed pages, scraped content, or sites pushing illegal or predatory products.
These are links that connect your site to places you simply don’t want associated with your brand. SEOs have long summed up the worst offenders as the three Ps — pornography, pharmaceuticals, and poker (unregulated gambling).
The good news: Google has repeatedly stated that its systems ignore most random spam links, so one or two of them won’t hurt your SEO. You generally don’t need to react to every junk domain that appears in your reports.
What should you do if you notice a large wave of spammy backlinks — or if you’ve received a manual action notice in Google Search Console?
Google recommends first contacting the websites where those backlinks come from and requesting removal. When that fails, you can use the disavow tool in Google Search Console to tell Google to ignore those links. Use it sparingly, though — it’s intended for genuine problems like manual actions or a history of paid links, not routine housekeeping.
2. Links from link farms and paid link schemes
Paid link schemes and “link mill” sites have been around for years, and it’s not hard to see why. They promise the sheer number of backlinks many site owners think they need to improve their rankings — fast and cheap.
The problem is that more links are not automatically better, especially when they come from shady sources built purely to sell links.
Google’s spam policies explicitly cover this behavior under link spam: links exchanged for money, excessive link swaps, and automated link-building programs all qualify. Search engines have spent two decades making their algorithms harder to exploit — they don’t want results to favor whoever bought the most backlinks.
You’ll inevitably run into offers that fall into this category: someone promising thousands of backlinks and guaranteed rankings for a small fee. Cheap bulk links are never worth it long term. No matter how clever the next exploit looks, it eventually gets detected and devalued — and your investment evaporates overnight.
What works instead? Create high-quality content people actually want to reference, and build links through legitimate outreach. Quality beats quantity every time. Done properly, tactics like guest posting and niche edits earn placements on real websites with real audiences — the opposite of a link mill. If you’d rather have specialists handle it, a professional link building service can build a clean, relevant link profile without the risk.
3. Press release backlinks
Press releases can also be a source of backlinks you don’t want — although they aren’t always bad for your site. It comes down to how you use them. Google has made clear that it doesn’t like press releases stuffed with optimized backlinks that add no value, and it treats keyword-rich links in distributed releases as unnatural.
You can absolutely still write quality news releases and pitch them to suitable outlets — that’s PR, and it works.
What you should avoid is filling a press release with keyword-heavy links back to your site and blasting it to dozens of newswires. Modern distribution services add nofollow attributes to links anyway, so the SEO “value” you’re paying for usually doesn’t exist.
It’s about working with search engines rather than against them. SEO takes time, and trying to shortcut it by pumping out link-laden press releases will hurt more than it helps — these methods get ignored at best and penalized at worst.
4. Irrelevant backlinks
We’ve talked a lot about spammy and shady backlinks, but sometimes bad backlinks are simply links that aren’t relevant to your business or valuable to your readers.
Say you run an e-commerce pet store. A link from a pet grooming blog is useful — it’s relevant to your visitors. A link from an Italian car dealer? Not so much.
If you accumulate backlinks from niches and industries unrelated to your own — especially with anchor text using terms that have nothing to do with your brand — you create confusion. Search engines can start associating your site with the wrong topics, and you may lose ground on the keywords that actually matter to your business.
How do you fix this? If the irrelevant links are pure spam, treat them as covered above: search engines are evolved enough to ignore most of them, and you can disavow them if the situation genuinely calls for it.
Sometimes, though, the problem is your own content strategy. If you’ve been publishing content on topics completely unrelated to your brand, you’ll attract links tied to those topics — and search engines may focus on them instead of your primary subject. In that case, bring your brand back on track: consolidate or move the off-topic content elsewhere, and invest in content that’s relevant to your niche.
How to audit and clean up your backlink profile
Finding bad backlinks doesn’t require guesswork. Here’s a simple process you can repeat every few months:
- Export your link data. Pull your backlink list from Google Search Console (Links report) and, if you have access, a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush for richer metrics.
- Flag suspicious domains. Look for sites with no real content, foreign-language pages unrelated to your market, sitewide footer links, exact-match commercial anchor text, and anything from the “three Ps.”
- Request removal where it matters. For genuinely harmful links, email the site owner and ask for removal. A short, polite message works best — our guide on email outreach that converts applies here too.
- Disavow only as a last resort. Reserve the disavow tool for manual actions or large-scale patterns of paid or spammy links you can’t get removed.
- Monitor going forward. New bad links appear all the time, especially if competitors play dirty. A quarterly check keeps surprises to a minimum.
Conclusion
Link building is a key piece of your online marketing strategy. Ideally, you want a natural network of links across the web that shows search engines what your brand is about and demonstrates your relevance to your target market. That’s exactly what authority link building is designed to achieve.
To be effective, backlinks need to be organic, relevant, and clean — and you need to identify and deal with the bad ones so they don’t hold your rankings back. If you’re starting from zero, our guide on how to get backlinks for a new site with no money is a great place to begin. And if you’d like an expert eye on your link profile, get in touch with our team — we’ll help you separate the links that lift your site from the ones dragging it down.