Backlinks of bad quality could be detrimental to your website and could pull down your ranking. You need to take proper care of the backlink profile of your website. The backlink profile consists of all the data of websites in which there is a backlink leading to your website.
It includes various backlink metrics for SEO which will help you find the bad-quality backlinks which hamper the SEO reputation of your site. Here are some of the points which you should take care of:
Penalized Sites
A penalized site is the most important thing to avoid. Google has a strict policy against those sites where black hat SEO is practiced. These practices include spam links, keyword fillings, or duplicate content. Such sites are flagged and heavily penalized by Google. The algorithm of search engines is automated to flag such practices and in certain cases are done manually as well. Once a site is penalized, it raises serious questions regarding the authenticity of the website.
Associating with the website which has been penalized could be trouble for your site as well. You can find out if you have built any backlinks from such a site by site searching the domain of that website. There will be a certain number of results that are indexed as it shows the number of pages ranking from that domain. If you fail to find the website you are looking for, it could well mean that the website is penalized by Google and is excluded from the search results.
Low-Traffic Sites
If your backlinks come from sites that have a low traffic, it should be a cause for concern for you and your site. Sites with minimal traffic don’t have enough value to add to your site. The main aim of backlinks is to get them clicking, which happens less in the case of low traffic sites. You can easily identify such sites as they look suspicious and often from unknown sources.
You can have a look at the Site Traffic Graphs to know about the changes in the traffic of your site. A graph with an upward trend is a good sign of growth and is likely to increase further. On the other hand, there could various reasons for downward growth. This could either be due to the competition or the sites might have been penalized.
Conclusion
Removing the bad quality backlinks will greatly minimize the negative growth rate of the ranking of your site. Make sure you look out for them.