This ultimate guide is everything you need to recognize bad links and eliminate them with the tools of Ahrefs, CognitveSEO, LinkResearchTools, SEMrush and Xovi. Links are and remain the most important factor in Google ranking for evaluating the relevance of content. Relevant links help a page enormously in its positioning. Poor links, on the other hand, can affect entire websites in such a way that only a few visitors reach the corporate site. Through the last years, negative SEO has turned out to be a trend that throws bad links at well-positioned websites. There is only one website that takes profit from this behaviour - that of the client. Negative SEO costs domains, revenues and ultimately jobs. This is why it is necessary to carry out a regular link audit as part of link risk management. During such an audit, bad links are identified and declared invalid (disavowed) to Google. A profile maintained in this way has better chances of good, lasting rankings. But even in the case of Google penalties, a manual link audit helps to show Google that everything possible is being done to remove links from malware-infected or hacked pages. For punished pages and domains, a link audit can help to regain the top positions in Google within a few days. Detecting and eliminating negative SEO attacks is therefore your little helper in detecting, evaluating and eliminating unwanted links to your valuable website.