Ahrefs carried out an experiment to test a common belief: whether deleting “harmful” external links can really improve a website’s search rankings. Here are the detailed steps:
- Selecting Experiment Subjects: Ahrefs chose 3 articles from its own blog as the objects of this experiment.
- Identifying “Toxic” Links: Using professional tools, they detected 129 so – called “toxic” external links pointing to these articles.
- Taking Action on Links: They utilized Google’s Disavow tool to tell search engines to ignore these 129 links.
- Monitoring Data: Initially, they planned to observe data changes over one month. However, due to a sudden large – scale Google algorithm update, they ended the experiment after 20 days.
- Analyzing Results:
- Overall website traffic decreased by about 7%.
- The search rankings of some pages declined.
- The rankings of other pages remained unchanged.
Key Takeaway: This experiment shows that we shouldn’t blindly trust the “toxic” links identified by tools. Deleting these so – called harmful links without careful consideration may harm the overall performance of the website.
Practical Advice: Instead of spending energy on cleaning up “suspicious” external links, it’s better to focus on enhancing the overall quality of the website. Unless Google officially warns you, there’s usually no need to worry too much about so – called “harmful links”.