While the above-mentioned methods are very commonly used they can lead to a manual penalty from search engines leading to either deindexing of the site or reduced search engine performance. You may end up getting a notification in the search console as well as an email indicating '“Unnatural inbound links persist on your domain”

In the race to achieve top ranking majority of website owners are only concerned with the end result and are not aware of how the rankings are being achieved - whether blackhat methods are being used on their website for delivering quick results or is their SEO company using long-lasting whitehat SEO methods. Another reason is that they are busy running their business and do not have the time to inspect backlinks or they do not have the expertise to analyze the backlinks and they think that since their rankings are improving for various keywords so their SEO company must be doing a good job.

A number of SEO agencies use blackhat or greyhat methods because:

• Building low quality links is less expensive

• Low quality links can be built in bulk thereby allowing management of more projects at any point of time

• Building niche specific links is very time consuming and requires dedicated efforts which is expensive

• Agencies do not have the required staff to deliver dedicated SEO campaigns for all of their clients

In addition to your SEO provider a competitor can also undertake a negative link building campaign for your site so as to negatively impact your ranking.

So, if you have a website which is more than 5 years old and is carrying the baggage of links from multiple SEO providers there is a high chance that your backlink profile may not be in a healthy state. You can save your site from a potential manual penalty by conducting backlink audit on quarterly, half-yearly or yearly basis. This will ensure that the low quality backlinks you have accumulated are disavowed so as to negate their impact.