Does Your Vape Site Have Toxic Backlinks?

by Feb 20, 2024Vape Shop Help

One of the unfortunate things about SEO agencies who aren’t very good at their jobs is that they sometimes resort to spam in an attempt to drum up business – and when those agencies start the spam train rolling, they often try to use fear as a way to get people to read their messages. If you’ve received an email saying that your vape site has toxic backlinks, you’ve experienced this tactic firsthand.

The phrase “toxic backlinks” is basically a bit of industry jargon that has no single accepted meaning – but we’ll attempt to assign a meaning to the term nevertheless. Toxic backlinks are links to your website that you don’t want because they could harm your site in some way.

Backlinks might be harmful, for instance, because they come from a website that’s doing something shady like distributing malware. The links could be harmful because they point to your site using anchor text that’s completely irrelevant. We’ll explain toxic backlinks in further detail shortly.

What Are Backlinks and How Do They Work

Here’s the good news: Your vape site probably doesn’t have toxic backlinks. If it did, you would probably already know about it – and you’re certainly not going to learn anything crucial about your website through an unsolicited email from a shady SEO agency.

Here’s another bit of information that might interest you.

Through our vape SEO service, we have worked with large and small vape companies all over the world since 2010. We have never advised a single client to disavow a link. That’s how rare toxic backlinks really are.

If you’re still concerned, never fear. In this article, we’re going to tell you everything that you need to know about toxic backlinks including how to identify them and what you can do about them. Before we jump into that, though, let’s begin with a bit of basic information that might help if these concepts are new to you.

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What Are Backlinks, and Why Are They Important?

If you’re new to running a website, it’s possible that the term “backlink” isn’t even familiar to you yet. Rest assured, though, that it will be very soon because obtaining backlinks is at the very core of marketing your vape shop or any other type of online business.

A backlink is a link from another website to your site, and backlinks are important because they represent a major portion of why Google’s algorithm chooses to rank one site over another for a given search.

What do you do, though, when many pages seem to contain content that satisfies a query? In this case, it can be useful to see what other people think – and that’s where backlinks come in. If a page that might show up for a given search has large number of backlinks, it might be given greater weight in the search results because those links are like votes of confidence. In addition, a backlink from a site that has many links pointing to it is worth more than a backlink from a site with few or no backlinks.

This link-weighting system – called PageRank – helps Google provide high-quality search results and helped to make the search engine an immediate hit after it was opened to the public. It’s only one of the many factors that Google uses to rank search results, but it’s an important factor.

Getting backlinks for vape sites is particularly hard, which is why it’s one of our specialties.

Google PageRank Toxic Backlinks

Visualization of Google PageRank.

What Are Toxic Backlinks?

Backlinks are really important to the success of any website, so that means getting any backlink must be a good thing, right?

Actually, no. There are some backlinks you really don’t want, and that’s why you’re reading this article. A toxic backlink is any inbound link with the potential to harm your website, either because it damages your business’s reputation or because it can result in a penalty from Google that will decrease your rankings and cut off your organic traffic.

What actually constitutes a toxic backlink is subjective, but here are three concrete examples of links you don’t want.

  • A link from a site that advertises a scam, distributes malware, spreads hate or disinformation, contains adult content or promotes illegal drugs.
  • Bulk links containing anchor text that’s completely unrelated to your business. The anchor text is the text that you click to visit a link. Given the proliferation of bot-generated content on the Internet these days, it’s normal to find a few links using irrelevant anchor text to point to your site. If you find a large number of links all using vulgar or insulting anchor text like “(business name) stinks,” though, you may have been the target of a negative SEO attack.
  • Spammy links created in extremely high volume by automated means. These types of links tend to show up in the comment areas of blog posts, on forum profile pages and on “get your own free blog” websites. They’re especially likely to be toxic if they all use anchor text exactly matching the search terms for which you’re trying to rank.

 

Did I Build Toxic Links to My Vape Site?

Toxic Vape Backlinks

In case you didn’t notice from reading the section above, backlinks that are created in bulk using automated software are much more likely to be toxic than those created by individual human website owners – and here, you might be a little worried.

Suppose you went to a low-cost freelance website. You found someone offering a package of 100 backlinks for five dollars, and you bought the package hoping that it would help you get a foothold on Google. It’s possible that you even got a little bit of traffic in the bargain, although it’s likely that your numbers quickly plateaued and didn’t grow from there. Did you make a huge mistake?

If you paid for a little package of starter links, you probably have nothing to worry about unless the links fall into one of the categories that we listed above. Starter links won’t get your vape site very far, but they’re also unlikely to cause any harm. Ultimately, though, one good backlink can have greater value for your site than hundreds of low-quality links.

How Can I Tell if My Vape Site’s Backlinks Have Caused a Google Penalty?

Here’s the crux of the issue. If your website is humming along normally and receiving organic traffic every day, you probably don’t have toxic backlinks and most likely don’t need to worry unless your links are egregiously bad like the ones described above.

If your site has experienced a sudden drop in traffic, though, it’s possible that you might have a reason to worry. Google has a human quality team that manually reviews websites to check for violations. If the quality team detects something amiss, they may assess a penalty that removes your site from Google’s index or severely reduces its rankings.

You will receive an email if you have a Google Search Console account and Google initiates a manual penalty against your website.

Just to be certain, though, you can also check for a penalty in Google Search Console. Here’s how to do it.

  • Log in to Google Search Console. If you don’t already have an account, you’ll need to create one and verify ownership of your website. Google Search Console is the main interface between your website and Google, so creating an account is very important if you haven’t done so already. This should bring you to a page showing an overview of your site’s search performance.
  • Scroll down the left sidebar and open “Security & Manual Actions.”
  • Click “Manual Actions.” If you see the message “No issues detected” on this page, your site isn’t under a manual penalty.

It’s impossible for Google’s review team to check the quality of every website that exists. For this reason, most Google “penalties” are actually just changes to the ranking algorithm. Google constantly updates its algorithm in an attempt to identify the characteristics of low-quality and spammy links, so those links can be automatically devalued. When a website experiences a large drop in traffic coinciding with an algorithm update, some people call that an “algorithmic penalty.”

What Should I Do if My Vape Site Lost Traffic After a Google Algorithm Update?

Google Algorithmic Penalty

The purpose of any Google algorithm update is to provide better search results. To accomplish that goal, Google strives to make its algorithm better at identifying high-quality content. One way to help high-quality content succeed is by getting better at understanding the content itself, and another way is by identifying and devaluing manipulative SEO techniques.

If your vape site lost traffic after a Google algorithm update, you shouldn’t think of it as a penalty against your site specifically. Google’s algorithm simply gets better and better at identifying and ignoring low-quality and manipulative backlinks. Every time Google updates its algorithm, there are winners and losers – and if you’ve experienced a drop in rankings, it doesn’t mean that there is a penalty against your site specifically. It simply means that some of the links pointing to your site no longer have the value they previously did.

The best way to recover from an algorithmic penalty and have lasting success is by building the best website you can and prioritizing the quality of the user experience above all else. In other words, you need to build your website for people – not for Google.

Should I Disavow My Vape Site’s Toxic Backlinks?

Before we delve into this topic, we need to reiterate that we have never advised any client to disavow a single backlink. Using the Google link disavow tool should almost never be necessary unless you’re under a manual penalty or have truly toxic backlinks like the ones we described above.

Don’t believe us? Watch the video on this page. Matt Cutts was the head of Google’s webspam team when the disavow tool was first created. If there’s an authority on when you should use the tool, it’s definitely him.

The reason why you generally shouldn’t try to use the disavow tool proactively is because a drop in search rankings resulting from an algorithm change isn’t a strike against your site – it’s a strike against a particular link building technique.

The issue is that – again, unless you have links like the ones described above – you really have no way of knowing which of the links pointing to your site are “good” and which ones are “bad.” The “bad” links most likely aren’t harming your site – they’re simply no longer providing any value. If you start disavowing links, you could end up disavowing “good” links and harming your rankings further.

If you want to disavow some links anyway, here’s how to do it.

How to Disavow Toxic Backlinks

The Google disavow tool is a feature of Google Search Console that you can use to tell Google that you want it to ignore certain links pointing to your website and not consider those links when assessing how your site should rank for various searches. There are only two reasons why you should ever want to use this tool.

  • You have been told by Google that your site is under a manual penalty.
  • You have links pointing to your site that you think could subject you to a manual penalty, and you want to proactively tell Google to ignore those links.

If you’re not sure what to do, please contact us for help.

This is important. If you are under a manual penalty, you’ll have to submit a reconsideration request in order to have your site listed by Google again. While you wait for Google to process the request, you’ll receive no traffic. You can expect the process to take multiple weeks, so it’s important to do things right. Before you use the disavow tool on your toxic backlinks, Google wants you to do your best to have those links removed. Document this process because you’ll want to include it with the reconsideration request.

Google has a very helpful page explaining how to use the disavow tool. In short, though, the process works like this:

  • You need to create a text file containing all of the links you want to disavow, with one link per line. You can also disavow all links from an entire domain by putting “domain:example.com” on a line.
  • Log in to Google Search Console and click this link to open the disavow tool.
  • Click the “Upload disavow list” button and upload your text file.

The page will tell you right away if your list contains errors, allowing you to correct those issues and try again.

If you change your mind in the future about disavowing certain links, you can upload a new list with those links removed. You can also cancel the entire disavowal list if you like. Note that it may take several weeks for Google’s index to reflect your request.

Remember that if your site is under a manual penalty, you must submit a reconsideration request to Google in order to have the penalty removed. You only need to do this if Google Search Console says that your site is penalized.

The Value of Ongoing Backlink Monitoring

If you found this article because you received SEO agency spam claiming that your vape site has toxic backlinks, we hope we’ve reassured you that your site’s backlinks are most likely fine. Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize that toxic backlinks and negative SEO attacks do happen and can harm your website’s reputation and search rankings. The best way to protect your site is by being proactive and always monitoring your backlinks.

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About the Author: Jason Artman

Jason Artman founded eCig One after switching from smoking to vaping in 2010 and has been a professional writer and SEO consultant since 2007. His work has been featured on television and in leading publications, and it has been referenced in numerous peer-reviewed journals. Jason works with leading vape brands around the world to generate targeted web traffic and increase their revenue.