Link Detox Risk

Link Detox Risk expresses the estimated risk a link has in a backlink profile. Everything value above 1000 very likely causes a link penalty.

DTOXRISK^® is short for Link Detox Risk^®.

Is your website at risk of losing organic traffic in Google and other search engines?

The metric Link Detox Risk® (DTOXRISK®) is the established and reliable way to find toxic links.

Link Detox Risk is the most reliable detection for spammy links hurting your rankings.

This precision is made possible with the machine learning system Link Detox Genesis and ongoing improvement and re-training. For this, LRT has the biggest data set and history of spam examples mentioned by Google used for that re-training purpose, simply because we were first in 2012, and even free for the first year.

The video below explains the calculation of Link Detox Risk^® and why it is important to analyze both ends of a link.

Keep your Link Detox Risk below 1000 to avoid tripping any Google Penguin filter, backlink related penalty or manual action.

DTOXRISK is a numeric result of our software calculations. This numeric result is sometimes labeled with verbal interpretations, such as high DTOXRISK or average DTOXRISK. It is also sometimes highlighted in different colors.

The labels given to links and websites, such as “High DTOXRISK”, are merely instructive. The labels are for the sake of program usability, and are not to be taken literally.

If you process a Link Detox report for a domain, we calculate the DTOXRISK score for every link. From the calculation and weighting of various rules for the links, their domains and their neighborhood, we derive additional technical criteria. Most of these technical criteria for each link are displayed in the application.

The higher the DTOXRISK score is, the more automated rules have been triggered and signal the potential risk of that specific link for your overall link profile. Our opinion and estimation, based on this calculation, is links with a high DTOXRISK score pose a higher risk for your Google rankings than those with a lower DTOXRISK score.

For the domain analyzed, we calculate another specially weighted average of all DTOXRISK scores and include additional criteria to get an overall Domain-wide Link Detox Risk (Domain DTOXRISK). We base the weighting of the single DTOXRISK score on our opinion, estimation, customer feedback, and experience of internal and external SEO experts.

We want to be very transparent in our estimation and explanation of our ratings. Some details or algorithms cannot be made public, as they are trade secrets and would increase the complexity of display in our application.

The DTOXRISK we recommend to you helps you to understand which links we deem more important to review before others.

Links with a high DTOXRISK score recommendation should be checked first. If you agree with our opinion and the link risk estimation expressed in our calculated DTOXRISK score, you should disavow as quickly as possible and then try to get these links removed. The higher the calculated DTOXRISK score is, the more attention you should give it during your review.

Links with a high DTOXRISK score recommendation should be checked first. If you agree with our opinion and the link risk estimation expressed in our calculated DTOXRISK score, you should disavow as quickly as possible and then try to get these links removed. The higher the calculated DTOXRISK score is, the more attention you should give it during your review.

Backlinks with an average DTOXRISK score should be reviewed right after those with high DTOXRISK score.

The DTOXRISK score we calculate expresses our opinion about the link risk assumed in these links. This score will help you understand our estimations and the various rules that led to it.

It’s your decision to either remove or disavow the link because you think it’s an undesirable link. For those instances, please give the link thumbs down. If you would want to keep the link, give the link a thumbs up to record your decision and help train our Link Detox Genesis algorithm.

You should always check Backlinks with a low DTOXRISK score. Especially if these appear to be strong links with money keywords, or if you know or assume these links could be paid links.

Paid FOLLOW links, which violate Google’s guidelines, cannot be reliably detected by automated systems, including Google. If you find a paid link that you think looks too obvious, we recommend to give it a thumbs-down, disavow the link and also have it removed.

You can also find links with a low DTOXRISK score of 0. This does not automatically mean that there is no risk in such a link. It means our automated system could not calculate a risk for it. A possible reason for a DTOXRISK value of 0 could be that you chose to ignore NOFOLLOW links, or it’s a paid link that could not be identified as such.

Backlinks that are marked as “Disavowed Link” in the DTOXRISK column, were reported as disavowed to us.

This means the user said he reported these links to Google by uploading a disavow file to Google Search Console and then uploaded that same file to us.

For reported disavow links, we always calculate a DTOXRISK value of 0. This does not automatically mean there is no risk in these links. It means we assume your upload to Google worked without errors, and that Google’s statement about completely ignoring the links is correct and the Disavow was already crawled by Google. To speed up the detection of disavowed links by Google, you can use our Link Detox Boost.

The links with a ”Disavow Review” DTOXRISK were reported by the user for review from a disavow file.

This means the user told us, that links were reported to Google for disavow and he wants to review the DTOXRISK scores in our application for them. Contrary to the normal application behavior, we then calculate DTOXRISK scores for these links. Normally we report a DTOXRISK value of zero for disavowed links.

Using this method, the user is able to review the quality of the disavow file.

The overall result of such a “Disavow Review” Link Detox report resembles a fictional situation, in which the disavow file was not uploaded to Google. In this mode, the user can edit the disavow file and rerun the report in classic mode to calculate the risk estimations before deciding to upload the disavow file to Google.

Once the user is satisfied with the estimations, he needs to download the new disavow file, upload the new disavow file to Google and wait for Google to recrawl all the links and disavows. Our Link Detox Boost product can help to speed up the recrawl.

Backlinks that are marked as “Ignored " in the DTOXRISK column were reported to be ignored to us.

This means we do not calculate a DTOXRISK score but report 0 for all such links.