Does removing bad and toxic backlinks really helps to increase website ranking in Google and Bing – here is my personal experience
Recently I contacted a few low quality external website and requested to remove backlinks to my site. After 6 months I checked that without adding any new relevant backlink to my website, the site’s ranking started to increase in Google and Bing search results. My site rank boosted from page three to page two for major keywords.
So yes, removing bad/toxic backlinks has directly improved rankings for sites hit by penalties or stuck in a plateau. This usually happens after a Google algorithm update targets manipulative link patterns. When we disavow or remove large volumes of spammy, irrelevant, or paid links, we often see a recovery in rankings for the affected keywords over the following weeks as the penalty lifts. More commonly, it prevents future declines rather than causing an immediate spike.
Proactively cleaning a backlink profile removes a significant risk factor. It makes the site’s link profile look more natural and trustworthy to Google’s algorithms and also to Bing. This solid foundation is crucial for supporting the positive impact of your other SEO efforts, like content creation, without being undermined by bad links.
So always remove spammy, irrelevant, and bad backlinks pointing to your site. Better to contact the site owners to remove it. Make sure you are pruning low-quality and toxic links that drag your website down in ranking. Many reddit users have also chimed that they’ve felt a noticeable boost after cleaning backlinks. Make sure you’re removeing off-topic backlinks too. If you are a mommy blog and write about home, lifestyle, kids, and family life and your blog has backlinks from crypto or casino sites then those are off-topic links that dilute your link profile and confuses the search engines. Removing them manually or through Google disavow tool will certainly help in slight boost in your website’s rank.