Why it matters on an HVAC site
It is sold to contractors constantly, usually as a monthly "toxic link removal" line on a retainer. The deliverable is a report from a tool that invented the category the report is measuring.
Google has said repeatedly that it ignores most low-quality links rather than penalising them, which is what makes the ongoing removal retainer hard to justify.
How to check it yourself
- If you use a toxicity score, name the vendor and treat it as that vendor’s opinion, never as a risk finding.
- The question worth asking is whether the links were built deliberately, which is a question about history rather than a score.
- Manual actions appear in Search Console. If there is no manual action, there is no penalty to remove.
Worked through in numbers
A contractor is quoted a monthly fee for removing toxic links, supported by a report listing 1,400 of them.
Search Console showed no manual action and none in the history. The 1,400 were mostly scraper sites and aggregators that had copied a directory listing, which nobody built and which Google ignores.
The retainer line was removed. The genuinely relevant question, whether anyone had ever bought links deliberately, was answered by the anchor profile and turned out to be a yes from 2022, which needed earned links rather than removals.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Link building. A vendor score, not a Google signal.