Toxic links

Toxic Links scores each of your referring domains for spam risk so you can spot the manipulative, low-quality links that can drag on your profile. A cluster of spammy referring domains — link farms, hacked sites, irrelevant foreign-language directories — can signal to search engines that your link profile is unnatural. This panel surfaces those candidates so you can investigate them and, where genuinely warranted, disavow. Done carefully, that cleans up your profile; done carelessly, it removes good links and harms you. The whole feature is built around doing it carefully.

Spam scores come from VisibilityIQ’s backlink index. There’s nothing to connect and no API key — scanning draws on your project’s included monthly data budget.

What you’ll need

• A synced backlink profile (see Backlinks overview). Toxic Links scores the referring domains already in your profile.
• Enough monthly data budget to run a scan.

How to use

1. Go to Project → Backlinks → Toxic Links.
2. Click Scan to score (or re-score) your referring domains. Each domain is enriched with a spam score from 0 to 100.
3. Sort by spam score descending so the riskiest domains rise to the top.
4. Work down from the worst, reviewing each domain before you decide anything.

How to read the results

Every referring domain gets a spam score on a 0–100 scale, shown in a color band:

Band	Score	Read it as
Green	Under 30	Low risk — normal, healthy links. Leave these alone.
Amber	30–59	Moderate — worth a glance, rarely worth disavowing on the score alone.
Red	60+	High risk / toxic — investigate first, before any disavow decision.

A high spam score is a signal to investigate, not an instruction to disavow. The score flags a domain that looks manipulative based on its own link patterns and characteristics; it cannot know whether that link is actually hurting you. Some high-scoring domains are perfectly legitimate links from messy-but-real sites.

Building a disavow shortlist

Work the panel as a triage queue, not a delete button:

1. Sort by score descending and start at the top — the red band.
2. Open each high-scoring domain and look at the actual linking pages. Ask whether the link is genuinely manipulative: a paid link scheme, an auto-generated directory, a hacked or spun-content page.
3. Add only the domains you’ve confirmed as manipulative to your shortlist. When in doubt, leave the link in place — a real link you can’t quite vouch for is almost always safer kept than removed.
4. Export your confirmed shortlist for use in Google’s Disavow Tool. Disavowing is a blunt, slow-to-reverse action, so confirm before you commit.

The cost of a false positive is real: disavowing a good link tells Google to ignore authority you earned. Bias toward caution.

Refreshing the data

Click Scan any time to re-score against the current profile — after a fresh sync, or when you want to recheck domains you flagged earlier. If you’ve enabled recurring auto-sync in Project → Settings, the underlying profile refreshes on schedule, but you still click Scan to re-run spam scoring on demand.

Next steps

• Backlinks overview — the full profile your spam scores are drawn from.
• Link velocity — catch the spammy-link spikes that often precede a toxic cluster.
• Link gap — once the profile is clean, find new high-quality domains to pursue.