What are toxic links?

Toxic links are low-quality or spammy backlinks that can negatively impact your website's search engine rankings and reputation with Google. These links often come from irrelevant, untrustworthy, or penalized websites, or they might be part of a link scheme. Google's algorithms are designed to identify and devalue such links, and their presence can lead to manual penalties or algorithmic demotions for your site. While links from competitors are generally natural and not inherently toxic, and old links are not necessarily bad, low-quality or spammy links are a clear indication of toxicity. Links with incorrect anchor text can be suboptimal for SEO but don't inherently make a link "toxic" in the same way that spammy sources do.