Have you ever encountered a situation in which a website is inundated with a large number of spam backlinks? In such cases, the websites targeted by these links typically face one of two outcomes in the eyes of Google: either they are disregarded, or they incur penalties.
How, then, can this situation be avoided? In the following, I will present a method that effectively mitigates this risk.
What benefits do backlinks bring to a website?
Backlinks are one of the key factors that search engines use to rank websites—almost all search engines work this way. Although their weight in ranking algorithms has decreased in recent years, they are still one of the most important factors. If you’re targeting high-search-volume keywords, relying on content quality alone is usually not enough.
This is where backlinks become especially important. But in the SEO world, there are two major challenges: the first is creating quality content, and the second is building backlinks. Both are difficult to manage. Content performance takes time to observe and adjust, but building backlinks can be really tricky. Gradually, many SEO practitioners turned to buying backlinks as a way to solve this problem.
The Risks of Buying Backlinks
Even without considering Google penalties, the biggest risk is that most of the so-called backlinks on the market are basically useless. Before writing this article, I even spent a few hundred yuan buying backlinks from private blogs that were supposedly DA 70 or higher.
But when you take a closer look, these backlinks aren’t anything special. They’re just AI-generated content with anchor texts inserted. After hundreds of posts, almost all of them cover the same topic, with hardly any diversity.
Diversity is just one issue. An even bigger problem is that most of these backlinks use almost identical website templates.
It’s clear that Google can now technically detect page uniformity. Think about it—backlinks all built with the same template? If it were you, you’d probably see it as cheating too!
Low-Quality Content Is Not Indexed
With the rise of the AI era, generating content has become easier and faster than ever. Some platforms can produce thousands of words for just a few cents. However, this creates enormous pressure for Google.
If Google does not implement technical measures to limit the indexing of low-quality content, its search results pages could be overwhelmed with spam.
Moreover, since published articles and their backlinks are often not indexed, these links offer no SEO benefit. As a result, buying backlinks is essentially a waste of money and does not earn Google’s favor.
Quality Backlink Building Can Also Leverage GEO
Speaking of which, I have to mention backlink building again. Just a few days ago (August 21, 2025), one of my articles was recommended by a website that gets over a million visits per month.
Plus, this site has a DA of over 70 and gets hundreds of thousands of page views per day.
What’s certain is that my site has been around for less than five months, and the content was only added in the past few months. Being recommended by a big site was entirely thanks to ChatGPT’s recommendation feature.
Of course, the main focus of this article is to show you how to remove spam backlinks, so consider this just a little teaser—I’ll definitely write a future post on how to use GEO techniques to attract backlinks.
How to Remove Spam Backlinks?
Now that we know spam backlinks are not only useless but also carry the risk of penalties, how can we minimize that risk? Of course, you could ask the providers to remove them one by one, but chances are they’ll refuse.
We can assume a scenario where competitors use a “sabotage” tactic by creating a large number of spam backlinks to our website. Would this cause us to be penalized by Google? In extreme cases, there is indeed a risk of being mistakenly flagged by Google.
To prevent this from happening, in addition to regularly checking and monitoring backlink updates, it is also important to promptly inform Google through the Disavow Links Tool in Google Search Console, thereby minimizing potential risks and protecting the site’s normal authority and rankings.
Google provides a feature called ‘Disavow links to your website.’ Basically, you select the sites you want to disavow and upload a TXT file telling Google which backlinks should be ignored. Once ignored, those links won’t get you penalized, even if you bought them in the past.
With this article, it’s time for me to say goodbye to the backlinks I bought before.
Once you upload it, Google will ignore those backlinks. Even if a competitor tries to sabotage you with spam links, you can resolve the issue by submitting them to Google.
What kind of external links are effective for GEO?
Unlike traditional SEO practices, the referrer-based approach places greater emphasis on overall relevance and semantic context, rather than relying solely on specified anchor text keywords. This may sound a bit abstract, so we can illustrate it with the following diagram.
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In the course of the above article’s discussion, Coeteco has compiled all referenced sources at the end of the text and clearly indicated their origins.
This is highly beneficial for the linked parties, as AI systems often treat these links as reference materials when crawling and analyzing the page. Consequently, there is a high likelihood that the AI will cite them as sources in its responses.
Of course, AI citations are currently quite flexible, and the same question may lead to different reference sources each time. In the future, if reference sources are not consistent, then GEO is unlikely to become a mainstream traffic entry point.
| Link Type | Features | Effect on GEO | Reason / Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| High-Relevance Backlinks | Source website content is highly relevant to the target topic (e.g., travel, geography, real estate) | Boosts ranking for specific GEO keywords | Search engines prioritize semantic relevance; high-relevance links help achieve precise ranking |
| Localized Backlinks | From websites, blogs, forums, or news media within the same city or region | Increases local trust and ranking | Search engines tend to favor pages with strong local credibility, aiding GEO targeting |
| Natural Anchor Text Backlinks | Anchor text is diverse and naturally embedded, not keyword-stuffed | Reduces risk of penalties, enhances authority | Modern algorithms value context and semantics over single keywords |
| High-Authority Domain Backlinks | From authoritative websites (news media, government, educational institutions) | Quickly increases page authority and ranking | High-authority domains pass trust and credibility, boosting page authority |
| Referrer-Based Backlinks | Emphasizes overall relevance and semantic context | Improves AI and search engine understanding of page content | Enhances discoverability and citation likelihood in GEO-related queries |
In short, you can refer to the following formula:
Effective GEO Backlinks = High Relevance + Localized + Natural Anchor Text + High-Authority Domain + Clear Semantic Context
My Deeper Thoughts on Spam Backlinks
Although spam backlinks don’t directly trigger Google penalties, they can still pose potential risks for your site in the long run. For example, if a Google quality evaluator happens to visit your site and finds a large number of unnatural backlinks, your rankings could be manually lowered or your site might even disappear from Google altogether.
There’s one site that used to get hundreds of thousands to over a million page views per month a few years ago, but in recent years it has been heavily penalized by Google. According to Ahrefs, it now only gets a few dozen visitors per day. There are many reasons for this, but backlinks clearly played a role—they were clearly violating the rules. For instance, you can pick just one of its backlinks as an example.
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Just by looking at the homepage, it’s clear that this is a self-built blog. If you were a Google quality evaluator, how would you view this behavior?
This shows that to maintain safe and stable Google rankings, you need to acquire high-quality backlinks through legitimate channels. In the next article, we’ll dive deeper into the proper way to do this.