A Toxic Backlink is generally any link that manipulates the search engine results or PageRank of a website. The harmful links can come from outside and lead to this website or point from the website to other domains.
Ideally, links should develop naturally, i.e. a useful website gets "real" links because many people find it good. If the links only serve to artificially increase the Google PageRank and the number of visitors, Google considers them "fake". Since the fake links manipulate the results, they are a violation of Google's guidelines and a website with a high number of toxic backlinks will be rated lower by Google. The PageRank and the number of visitors decrease.
How do Toxic Backlinks affect the PageRank of a website?
If Google finds harmful links, the corresponding website is algorithmically penalised.
Google's algorithm mainly serves to bring a positive result to the user by presenting him with the most relevant results of his search. Backlinks are very important for working out the relevance to the respective search. So if Google finds that certain links do not strengthen the page but only serve to manipulate the results, Google considers them harmful.
If the number of harmful links is far higher than the number of good quality links, this creates an imbalance in the website's profile.
In this case, Google can manually or algorithmically penalise the website by lowering the PageRank.
What can you do against toxic backlinks?
If you find out that your website has too many harmful links, go to your Google Webmaster Page. Here you can manually disavow links. Disavowing a link means that you officially recognise this link as an unauthorised toxic backlink, so that it is no longer used for the evaluation of your SEO profile.
Additionally, if you want to be sure that the harmful links are removed from your website, you can find professional help. There are companies that specialise in removing toxic backlinks. For websites that receive income from Google Adsense, this is a good investment.
