How Toxic Backlinks can Effect your Adsense Earnings ?

The influence of backlinks, DR (domain rating), PR (page rating) is very high for ranking in Google.

SERPs indirectly affect Google Adsense earnings.  SEMrush gives a toxic score to indicate whether your backlinks are good or bad.

These inbound links have to come naturally. A toxic backlink checker is badly needed to analyze your ranking and income results.

In 2020 era, you have to understand the importance of quality of backlinks.

So we generally resort to link building tactics through guest posts, infographics, sponsored posts etc.

One interesting point is that all links are not created equal. Most of the big sites have high authority profile links from big DR domains.

If your articles are well promoted in PR pages, submitted to good directories, referred by .edu domains, naturally you will get high Ahrefs DR.

But the game does not end there.

Read More : How To Increase Adsense Earnings in 2017 By Finding the Right Categories to Block?  

How to find Toxic Score using SEMrush?

As we know we have different SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs etc, where we can find competitors data.

• In SEMrush you just put in the website URL.
• Then, you will get a list of competitors.
• Once you click an competitor website you get different seo metrics.
• These include organic search, top organic keywords, competitive positioning map etc.

At the same time, if you click on Backlinks on the left hand side, you will get the inbound links pointing to your competitor.

This is generally useful to know your current link profile status.

But it has some shaddy practices. Once any site owner knows his competitor backlinks, he may try to build some low authority links to the competitor site.

Backlink Audit using SEMrush

1. Under Projects, it is one of the options.
2. You can configure them individually.
3. The first mentioned feature is one of them.
4. You need to add your site to Projects and then connect your Search Console account.
5. Then it will ask for authorization checks like parameters for “Pages crawled per day” and you have to provide.
6. Once its final, the SEMrush tool will go into a background process to find the backlinks to your site.

Finally the result is produced with the following metrics –
1. Referring Domains
2. Total Backlinks
3. New
4. Lost
5. Overall Toxic Score
6. Audited Backlinks

Influence of SEMrush Toxic Score

The last two parameters above have good influence on your Adsense returns. SEMrush has this metric Toxic score assigned to each backlink. The rating is from 0 to 100.

The least is the toxic score, it is a good backlink. It is also colored green to show its good. But as the toxic score increases, the color changes to grey. Finally, if they are high toxic, it is shown in red.

My Experience with Adsense Earnings and Toxic Backlinks?

We have a tool in Google called “disavow” tool. Generally, when you find such high toxic backlinks, you need to contact the domain author and ask them to remove them from their site.

But even after persistent messaging, if they are not removed, then you can disavow them. This is like asking Google to “forget” or “neglect” the influene of such bad backlinks.

The toxic score is based on a complex formula and generally is a very good indication of how good, bad, medium type are your backlinks.

Read More : How To Increase Adsense Earnings in 2017 By Finding the Right Categories to Block? 

So using the disavow tool, you can add the bad domains and links asking Google to neglect their influence, using a txt file. They are not actually deleted, but not counted in your SEO score.

As you can see, I have changed my disavow file on 28th Oct 2017.

I have been using the SEMrush tool for over 2 years and the BackLink Audit feature for over an year. So whenever I find high toxic backlinks I disavow them.

This way my backlink profile is kept clean.

Observation: I found that the traffic didn't increase much even after disavowing bad links.

You also have a provision to download your previous text file uploaded to the disavow tool.

So recently I downloaded the old version of backlink txt file and removed all the domains and links that are considered toxic in SEO rating.

Note: You cannot blindly believe backlink toxic score. SEMrush is one of the many SEO tools. It is not the officially recommended tool of Google. So you have to cross-check your results when you “disavow” any backlinks. 

Influence of Toxic Backlinks on Adsense Revenue

Then my Adsense earnings plummeted immediately.

I was normally getting like $3 to $6 every day when I have the backlinks in the disavow list. But when I removed all the domains and links from disavow tool, my Adsense earnings dropped to below $2.

So initially I thought that it was some other reason due to which my earnings reduced. So I did not do anything till one week.

But since my Adsense income were not increased, I uploaded the old disavow file again on Oct 28th , 2017. Immediately my earnings started to increase again.

As you can see above, there is change in trend of adsense income from the date I changed my disavow file.

Earlier when I removed all the domains and links in the disavow file, my daily earnings reduced.

Also, the RPM and CPC reduced after I removed all the toxic domains and links. Once I uploaded the old file with bad profile data, they increased again.

Conclusion

So in my case-study, I think that toxic backlinks do not always have an influence on your Adsense earnings.

It depends on site to site basis.

You have constantly keep checking the traffic and revenue results. If you are affected by one of the Google algorithms, you can get positive results. Your traffic will increase when you disavow links.

But if SEMrush thinks the backlinks are toxic, but Google does not pay much attention to those links, you can get negative results. This means backlinks and adsense are not connected. Then you need to upload your old backlink profile data again, so you have the same old traffic and adsense earnings.