Tutorial: Use SEO Spyglass to Fish Out Harmful links and Boost Your Rankings

I have been looking lately for ways to find harmful back links pointing to my sites. I just got an email from Link-Assistant about there brand new feature in their ‘Spy Glass’ software

Basically they have added a new feature that actually scans your back links and gives them a risk level.  Now this is a great help to us because we know that Google penalises sites with poor quality, spammy back links! so wouldn’t it be great to know how to find harmful back links.

One of the biggest hurdles that faces site owners and SEO’s is finding these bad links! To be honest it’s always been a ball ache to go through a whole back link profile and weed out the harmful links.

Not only that, but SEO SpyGlass gives you a 100% simple and proven way to out rank ANY site for pretty much ANY keyword! This is by far one of my favourite tools and if you are serious about SEO then it’s well worth downloading this software!

 

Introducing the ‘Link Risk Audit’ feature in SEO Spyglass. How To Find Harmful Back Links

Harmful links can completely ruin your rankings. So in this tutorial I am going to show you how to find them and remove them before they do any harm!

If your site has already been hit then by a Google penalty then you can use this to remove the spammy links and get your site back where it belongs!

 

 

 

As you can see from the graphic above. SEO Spyglass will give you mark each link as either Green, Amber or Red.

 

Put it to the test

Remember the case study I did on Why my site lost rankings? well Im going run that affiliate site through SEO Spyglass and see just how many of the back links are actually harming the site:

Step 1:

Open SEO Spyglass and enter a new project

Just type in a keyword in the top box (necessary but not important)

In the 2nd box where it says ‘Competitors URL’ you actually want to enter your own URL…

 

 

 

> Click next

Once the software has finished loading your sites back links and data, you will be presented with this screen:

 

 

 

 

 

> Click ‘Yes’

And then make sure all of the options are selected below and click next:

 

 

 

 

You should now be presented with a list of all the backlinks to your site as well as lots of other data!

I couldn’t fit it all on here but as you can see from the image below, I have sorted the links by ‘the highest risk’ first! Below you can see that this site has quite a few harmful links and it’s no surprise to see why this site went from page 1 to page 4+

 

 

Note: If the ‘link risk’ column is not showing properly, I found that by clicking on ‘Update’… ‘update factors for selected backlinks’

This would then fill out all of the ‘link risk’ column.

Not sure why this happens, maybe it’s a slight glitch!

 

Analyse the harmful links

I like to sort the column with the highest risk links first. This makes sense because we want find out which ones are harming our rankings!

The thing I like about this great new feature is that it actually gives you an analysis of each link!

Simply hover your mouse over the bad link and then click the ‘information’ tab as shown here:

 

 

Here is what it brought up for this particular link:

 

 

 

Hmmmm…. Dose not look a good link at all.

In fact, there are quite a few bad links for this site that need addressing!

 

How to get rid of harmful links:

There are only 2 real ways to get rid of these links:

1) Contact the webmaster and ask them to remove it – Although this option does not always work because the webmaster will probably ignore you or they won’t give a damn about their site or yours! Link-Assistent has a handy feature where it searches for the contact details for the domains.

2) Use the Google Disavow tool – This is probably your best option as you can tell Google to ignore these links.

Here’s how to do it:

 

 

 

Now you should have a nice clean Back link profile 🙂

 

SEO Spyglass has become an invaluable tool to have in your SEO armoury! Especially if you want to find harmful backlinks.

My recommendation is that you use SEO spyglass once per month to keep on top of any new back links that may be classed as ‘harmful towards your site.

It’s also a great tool if you have your own SEO company or do SEO work for clients.

 

This great piece of software has a ton of other features too. You can download a free trial if you like.

 

I could write a ton of tutorials for this software but all of the features are highlighted on their website.

I hope you found this short tutorial helpful and please remember to share it to help grow this wonderful blog 🙂

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