What is a Bad Backlink?

1. It's rarely a single backlink, but more a bad link backlink profile.

- Over optimized anchor texts
- Links from known bad neighborhoods
- Sitewide/Footer links
- Poor diversity

etc..

2. Yes there are companies out there at advertise doing this "Negative SEO your competitors" and then there's companies out there now offering services for "Link Clean Ups". It happens every day, it's a huge controversy in the world of search these days.

Bad backlinks are like bad girlfriends.

1) They're worthless.
2) They're easy to get.
3) You have nothing in common with them.

With that said, bad backlinks... the type you might use for NSEO, can be used effectively for parasite SEO. And you can make a lot of money using them. Thats when you rank your content on sites that are too big to fail or get penalized. Like youtube, facebook, blogger, etc etc.

Its very ironic and difficult for some marketers to understand. But I have 1 campaign I used in GSA to rank a 34,000 SM video keyword. That video has been #1 on Google for over a year now.

And I wound up duplicating that same exact campaign to NSEO a competitors website. So the concept of "bad backlinks" can be confusing. For a blackhat marketer, they are the best links in the world. For a whitehat marketer, they won't go near them. For a grayhat marketer like myself, I'm stuck in between.

I use a dedicated server to churn out 100s of thousands of the shittiest links you can imagine, for my parasite SEO projects, and I make good money thanks to those links. So I don't personally consider them "bad". They don't become "bad" until I start working on a new site. At which point I avoid them like the plague.

Bad backlinks watch porn with the volume all the way up.

It's like pornography. You know it when you see it!

The backlinks moral police have hijacked what it means to be white/grey/black hat so you either fit neatly in a box or confuse the hell out of people.

QUESTION: What characterizes Bad backlinks?

ANSWER:
- Anchor text which are not varied enough
- Most backlinks gotten from only a few domains or IPs
- Inconsistent rate of backlink building
- Lots of backlinks from irrelevant sites

QUESTION: How do search engines mark sites with bad backlinks?
ANSWER: They penalize you by 1) removing you completely from SERPs or 2) decrease your ranking

QUESTION: Wouldn't it mean someone can just hire someone to create lots of backlinks to take competitors down from SERP so your page ends up ranking higher?

ANSWER: Sadly, yes. That's why Google has the disavow tool to help webmasters to get rid of these bad backlinks created by competitors.

P.S. If you want to get good SERPs, concentrate on improving your own SEO, and less on destroying others

Bad Backlink, do you need examples for this? Any backlink you get from a website which is spammed or penalized or not related to your niche or you are getting a link from a website which has duplicate content, have high outbound links. These type of links can risk your website.

Hire a link auditing service if you don't know how to find bad links. They will have much more experience than you and you can trust their results better than "eyeballing" it and hoping you know what you are doing.

Pretty much any link YOU build is against Google's TOS.

Bad backlinking could be one of the follow statements:
1. Poor quality backlinks
2. Not relevant backlinks
3. Not according to Google guidelines.
4. Bad anchor tags used for link building etc

A backlink is any link that points to your website from another. Backlinks are a critical aspect of search engine optimization. High-ranking, relevant backlinks help demonstrate to search engines that your site is respectable and useful. However, in addition to amassing backlinks on respected websites, you may find some incoming links to your site with less than reputable origins.

Bad backlinks is one that not generat a lot of organic traffic in comparison to the traffic the page that is linking out gets.

Bad backlinking could be one of the follow :
1. Poor quality backlinks
2. Not relevant backlinks
3. Not according to Google guidelines.

Well, tell me you are the owner of say "Accenture" and now you tell me what type of links you want to point to you site? I am sure you don't want backlinks from low quality site, irrelevant sites, site having low trust score.... etc so, in this way google identifies .... what are the bad backlinks. As far as hiring professional in order to take down competitors yes you can do that many people are doing such things against the competitors.