This Texas Personal Injury Lawyer had Toxic Backlinks - What Happened After We Removed Them is Crazy!
What disavowing toxic backlinks did to this law firm's website rankings
Here we have a Personal Injury lawyer in Texas. Despite over 12 months of hard work on his website’s SEO, rankings were still up-and-down.
So, we looked at something new: Toxic backlinks.
What is a toxic backlink?
Toxic backlinks are like bad referrals on the internet. Just as good recommendations can boost your reputation, bad ones can harm it.
They're links from shady or low-quality websites that can hurt your own website's credibility and ranking on search engines like Google. It's important to steer clear of them to maintain a positive online presence.
How we found them
We use SEMrush as our SEO tool of choice, and ran a backlink audit on the law firm’s domain.
SEMrush then produced a list of all backlinks including their toxicity score, which we exported into excel.
Looks something like this:
Check out the Toxic Score in column D. These are high toxicity scores!
It’s also clear a lot of these based on domain authority and Source Page Title are total garbage.
None of these are backlinks to the law firm’s website because of exceptional content.
How to Remove Toxic Backlinks
Run a backlink audit in SEMrush.
Export the list.
Open ChatGPT and share the list, then prompt ChatGPT to create a disavow .txt file from the list.
Go to Google Search Console, select the proper web property, and upload the file there to tell Google to remove these backlinks
We checked the website rankings report after 1 week and discovered something amazing.
Once Google disavowed the toxic backlinks, here’s what we saw in this law firm’s website rankings:
He moved up 717 total positions across the most important keywords that lead to new signed cases.
This is insane.
All from bad backlinks.
Bottom line:
Your website’s ability to attract new law firm clients organically on Google is all about understanding the details.
There is no 1 silver bullet strategy out there.
It’s all about testing and leading with the data.