Can Low Quality but Organic Links Hurt Your SEO?

Our Support Angels were asked an interesting question recently: can low quality but absolutely organic links ruin SEO and decrease rankings.

To answer the question we should first understand what is the difference between “low quality” and “low authority” backlinks.

Low quality links are the links that can ruin rankings. These links are usually created to manipulate search engine results and can’t be called organic. These links are usually created for search engines, not human searchers and are placed on sites no real people visit. These links can and probably will hurt your rankings if the majority of your backlinks are low quality.

Low authority links are the links you can call organic. These are links that real people put on their websites but they don’t have much link juice to pass on. If the content is unique and well written, these links are not harmful and can bring you traffic and link juice later.

If you start working on a site that was previously optimized by someone else, be sure to check the quality of the site’s backlink profile in order not to risk your search engine positions. Use the ‘Toxic Links’ report located inside the WebCEO Backlink Quality Checker and detect low-quality links so you can report them to Google in time.