What is Backlink Profile? Your Guide to Understanding & Analyzing Your Backlink Profile (2024)

Yeah, we get it, we’ve covered this quite a bit and no, we won’t talk about the importance of backlinks once again.

Today, we are here to learn about a new thing, something that is really important in the link building world – backlinks profile. 

Yes, backlinks profile. If you’ve been learning about link building for a while now, We are sure that you might have some time or another come across this term. 

That is because backlinks profile is an extremely important term in link building.

Let us now learn what a backlinks profile is along with everything associated with it. 

Let’s go. 

What is a backlink

Before we get into a backlinks profile, let’s first understand what a backlink is.

So, a backlink (also known as an inbound link) is when one website links to another website.

Read this article to learn more about what a backlink is.

What is an example of a backlink

Backlinks can be found in most articles uploaded on the internet. It’s when a link is added to a text somewhere in the article. For example, this text contains a link that’ll take you to another website. In this case, SERP Forge is providing a backlink to that website.

What is a backlink profile

Well, it’s super easy to understand what a backlinks profile is.

In simple words, a backlinks profile is your website’s profile that shows the number of backlinks pointing to your website.

It also includes other relevant information such as the types of links, their anchor text, the domain authority of the website it is coming from, and relevance.

Think of it as a social media profile. Just as a social media profile contains posts and their details, a backlinks profile contains all the backlinks a website has along with its details.

Why is a backlinks profile important

Okay, now that you understand what a backlinks profile is, you might be wondering what it does and why it is important, right? Let’s make things clear today.

1. To maintain quality

What does a backlinks profile do? It gives you information and details about all the backlinks coming to your website. 

So by getting an entire overview of all the backlinks that your website is receiving, you get to understand where your website stands in the link building game and what needs to be improved.

It also saves you from penalties or negative SEO in case your website is receiving spammy links from an external website.

All of this helps you maintain the quality of the backlinks coming to your website and boost your SEO rankings.

To automate entire process you can look for an credible SaaS link building agencies.

2. To keep things relevant

You see, Google also checks the Industry and niche of the websites that are giving you backlinks to understand the context and relevance of your content. 

If you are receiving backlinks majorly from different industry websites, it might get difficult for you to rank for your industry keywords. 

On the flip side, if you are receiving backlinks from websites that are relevant to your industry, it might show Google that other experts in your industry trust you and will help you rank in your industry.

This can be done by analyzing your backlinks profile and understanding the industries your backlinks are coming from.

3. To diversify links

Well, link building is not just about having a bunch of links; it’s about having the right links. 

Now we all know that if you want to grow your SEO, you need to get quality backlinks from high-authority websites and relevant businesses. But you know what? That’s not enough.

When building links to your website, it’s also important to put all your eggs in different baskets.

Google appreciates websites that get different types of links. The key here is to never rely too much on a single type of link. 

This can also be done with the help of your backlinks profile. By taking a look at your backlinks profile, you can check the kinds of links you are receiving and what needs to be changed. 

4. To beat your competitors

Your backlink profile gives you an overview of all the backlinks coming to your website and lets you analyze the quality of those backlinks.

Along with this, it also gives you the power to compare your backlinks profile with your competitors’ backlink profile to understand where you fall behind and what needs to be changed.

You can take a look at your competitors’ link profile and analyze the number of backlinks coming to their websites, the quality of those backlinks, and where they are coming from.

This will help you understand what works for them the best and create a better strategy to gain high-quality backlinks.

What are the factors affecting your backlinks profile

Everyone talks about what backlinks are, why they are important to Google, and so on. But no one talks about how things work here. 

In order to ensure that no one uses spammy tricks to gain backlinks and rank higher on Google searches, Google has created and maintained a list of factors that actually affect a backlinks profile and determine whether it’ll help a website rank higher or not. 

Some key factors affecting a backlinks profile are:

• The anchor text
• Nofollow or dofollow tag
• Diversity in the types of links
• Relevance of the sender’s website
• Number of links
• Domain authority of the sender’s website

What makes a good backlink profile

It’s important to understand what makes a good backlink profile so that you can follow those rules and steps to maintain yours. 

Here are some key points and factors that make a good backlinks profile:

• The first and foremost indicator of a good backlinks profile is the relevance of its backlinks. A good backlinks profile contains backlinks from websites that are relevant to its niche or topic. 

• Next, check if the backlinks are coming from websites with high domain authority and a higher brand credibility ensuring a good quality of links is maintained. 

• The anchor texts of those backlinks should be relevant to the main topic and diversified to avoid looking spammy.

• The backlinks profile should contain a variety of links such as links from blog articles, links from directories, links from niche-related sites, and so on, to ensure diversity is maintained.

• Constant sudden spikes must be avoided and steady organic growth must be maintained to avoid looking spammy to search engines. 

• Lastly, a good backlinks profile should not contain low-quality links from low-tier and spammy websites.

What makes a bad backlink profile

Now along with understanding the factors that make a good backlinks profile, it’s also important to understand all the factors that make a bad backlinks profile to avoid them in the future. Here is a list.

• The first thing that directly signals Google that it is a bad backlinks profile, is the quality of the backlinks. If your profile is flooded with hundreds of low-quality websites from spammy websites and forums, it’s time to make some changes real quick.

• If your website is about food, but you are receiving links from gaming websites, it’s a bad backlinks profile.

• Next, if the anchor texts of your backlinks are too obvious and overly optimized, it’s time for a change. This is because too much of a good thing can be good for nothing. Anchor texts with unnaturally stuffed keywords can make your profile look bad. 

• A bad backlinks profile fails to maintain the diversity of links.

• A bad backlinks profile contains links from websites that are created solely for linking to each other. 

What is an anchor text

An anchor text is the text where a link is placed on a web page. It is the text that appears either in a different color or with an underline indicating that a link is placed there. 

Why is an anchor text important for SEO

The biggest reason why an anchor text is extremely important for SEO is because it helps both the users as well as the search engines in getting context.

For users, it helps them to indicate where a link is placed on a web page and where it’ll take them. 

For search engines, it helps in getting the context of the link. For example, if a page discussing guest posting adds a link to another blog with an anchor text that says “best guest posting sites”, it tells Google what the linked page will contain.

What are the types of anchor texts

One thing to keep in mind when building your backlinks is that you must focus on diversifying your anchor texts. If your website is receiving too many backlinks with the same anchor text, it may get obvious to Google that something needs to be changed and Google might also penalize you. 

Here are the types of anchor texts you can go for to diversify your backlinks profile.

Naked URL

Naked URLs are links that, instead of using some texts, are URLs themselves. This means that when using text to add a link, naked URLs are straight URLs to your website. 

One example of a naked URL is – https://www.google.com/chrome/. 

Now if you are thinking that having naked URLs as your anchor texts is the last kind of anchor text you would want, then you are not entirely correct. 

You see, while naked URLs may seem raw on the surface, they are beneficial as they help you diversify your anchor texts. So yes, having some naked URLs as your anchor texts is a good option.

Keyword anchor text

Keyword anchor texts are texts with the keywords you are trying to rank for. For example, if you are trying to rank for “food” related searches, having an anchor text with food niche-related keywords can help you rank for these searches. 

It’s important to note that having too many keyword anchor texts can seem like an artificial way of building links and lead to penalties.

Branded anchor text

Brand anchor texts are the kinds of texts that include your brand name as the anchor texts. It simply means having your brand name as your link. 

The best thing about branded anchor texts is that along with backlinks and some referral traffic, it also helps you spread brand awareness among people.

Where to find your backlinks profile

Now that you know so much about backlinks and a backlinks profile, it’s time to understand where you can find it. A backlink profile is not something that you can simply find on your website. 

So where can you find it? You can find your backlinks profile with the help of SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Search Console. 

That is because it is simply very difficult for any tool to keep track of all the websites Google crawls on a daily basis. As a result, you won’t be able to get accurate data on your backlinks.

Step-by-step backlinks profile analysis

• What is a backlinks profile – ✅
• Importance of backlinks profile – ✅
• What does a good or bad backlinks profile look like – ✅

Great. Now that you know almost everything about a backlinks profile, it’s now time for you to get a step-by-step guide on how to analyze your website backlinks profile.

Step 1: Analyze all your referring domains

What is a referring domain? Well, a referring domain is the website or domain that is pointing a link to your website. 

For example, if we are getting a link from Hubspot, the referring domain here would be – https://www.hubspot.com/

It’s important for you to check all the domains that are pointing to your website. 

You can use backlinks analysis tools like Ahrefs and Semrush or you can use a free tool like Google Search Console to analyze your backlinks profile.

Note that it’s always the best option to have a higher total number of referring domains. The total number of referring domains is even more important than the total number of backlinks. 

This is because Google appreciates it when you get backlinks from multiple websites.

What’s the difference between a backlink and a referring domain

Now let’s understand the difference between a backlink and a referring domain.

A backlink is the link that your website receives from an external website. On the other hand, a referring domain is the website that is sending that link (the source from which the backlink is coming from).

The only difference between backlinks and referring domain is that the number of backlinks coming from a website can vary but the referring domain will still be counted as one. 

For example, if your backlinks profile have 10 backlinks all coming from the same website: 

• Number of backlinks = 10
• Number of referring domains = 1

And here’s why Google loves it when you receive more backlinks from different referring domains.

For example, think of referring domains as individual voters and backlinks as votes from them.

If your website is getting a lot of votes from the same voter, it won’t impact your site a lot. However, if your website is receiving votes from many different voters, Google will love it and improve your rankings.

It’s that simple!

Step 2: Analyze your total number of backlinks

Next, it’s time to analyze the total number of backlinks pointing to your website. The more backlinks you have to your website, the higher your chances of ranking on Google.

You must also try to analyze the number of backlinks coming from each website. This is important to analyze because one website can send multiple backlinks to your website. 

Step 3: Analyze your backlinks quality

Once you’ve got the complete data of the number of backlinks coming to your website, next, it’s time to analyze the quality of those backlinks.

It doesn’t matter how many backlinks your website receives if those links coming to your website are of low quality.

One thing to keep in mind here is that though these backlinks analysis tools might not always give you the most accurate data, they are still very useful to outrank your competitors and boost your rankings.

Here are some things you need to check to determine the quality of your backlinks:

Domain Authority

The domain authority indicates the authority and the trustworthiness score of the domain referring to your website. 

Page Authority

Just like domain authority, page authority indicates the score of the individual page your backlink is placed on. 

Spam Score

With the help of SEO tools like Moz, you can also check the spam score of each backlink. A high spam score indicates low-quality links.

Follow vs Nofollow

You must also check each backlink and whether it is a dofollow or a nofollow link, to determine its quality.

Relevance

Lastly, try to check the relevance of the links coming to your website with your content. The more relevant the link is, the higher the quality of your link is.

Step 4: Analyze your anchor texts

We’ve discussed in detail about anchor texts above, and this step is all about using that knowledge to build your backlinks profile the right way.

Take a look at all your anchor texts and determine the distribution percentage of those anchor texts. Whether they are coming from naked URLs, branded texts, or keyword texts. 

It’s important to note that you must try to maintain diversification, as a higher percentage of specific types of anchor texts can appear spam to Google and result in penalization.

Step 5: Analyze your competitors

You see, only analyzing your own backlinks profile is not enough. If you want to make the right decision and know where your backlinks profile stand, you’ll need to first analyze and understand your competitors’ backlinks profile.

Analyze the number of backlinks coming to their website, their quality, anchor texts, and the websites they are coming from.

Next, also check the pages that are receiving the most backlinks. This will help you understand what worked for them, so you can use a similar strategy in a new way.

Step 6: Analyze the link velocity

A link velocity is basically the pace at which you are getting backlinks to your profile. It is important to check because too many sudden spikes in your growth can seem too unnatural to Google and may result in penalties.

That’s why it’s important to maintain a slow and steady growth of backlinks coming to your website or follow your pattern. For example, if you are receiving 10 backlinks each week, make sure your website maintains that pattern and that there isn’t any sudden unnatural spike in backlinks.

Step 7: Take action

Finally, once you’ve completely analyzed your backlinks profile, you need to then analyze your competitor’s backlinks profile.

Take a look at your backlinks profile and compare it with your competitor’s profile to understand where you lack, what needs to be changed, and what can developed.

Once this is done, you’ll need to then come up with better strategies to gain backlinks.

If you think that your backlinks profile isn’t what you wanted it to be then it’s time to make some serious changes.

Identify all the low-quality links to disavow them and use strong strategies to gain quality links from different sources and with diversified anchor texts. 

What are some common backlinks profile mistakes

Here are some of the common backlinks profile mistakes that you need to avoid. 

1. Don’t buy spammy links

The first common mistake you must avoid is buying spammy links for your backlinks profile. You should know that search engines can easily identify spammy links, penalize your website, and decrease your trustworthiness score. 

However, if you want to outrank your competitors by getting more links to your website, you can always contact an expert link building service like SERP Forge and boost your rankings.

2. Don’t participate in link schemes

What are link schemes? Link schemes are all about using artificial methods to gain backlinks and manipulate rankings. Some common link scheme methods are – link exchange, Private Blog Networks, and reciprocal linking. 

We at SERP Forge, only use white-hat techniques focusing on ABC exchanges to get backlinks to your website without engaging in any kind of shortcut techniques or direct exchanges.

The most important point here is that you must never rely on artificial methods to build your backlinks profile. It surely might look like a gain in the short term. But once Google identifies the artificial links, you’ll realize the consequences of using such methods. 

That’s why it’s best to always use natural and genuine methods to build links.

Our expert team knows what works and avoids any kind of shortcuts to make sure your website stays in the safe zone while getting high-quality backlinks from popular websites.

3. Don’t ignore anchor text diversity

We’ve now talked about this a lot of times. It’s very important to always diversify your anchor texts. 

Having a specific type of anchor text might not seem like an issue on the surface, but because Google is a search engine that uses a lot of methods to identify artificially gained links, having the same kind of anchor text might seem like an issue to its search engine.

Using the same anchor texts again and again can make your backlinks profile appear unnatural to search engines which can lead to a lower trustworthiness score. 

4. Don’t ignore nofollow links

Now this one is a serious mistake that you need to avoid. 

You see, when it comes to building a backlinks profile many people believe that having nofollow links to their profile is of no use and is only going to damage their rankings, which is entirely wrong.

Having some nofollow links to your profile is also beneficial to your website which can help you get a lot of referral traffic to your website and improve your brand image.

5. Don’t ignore quality control

The final mistake to avoid when building your links profile is ignoring the importance of quality control. 

It’s your job to regularly check and analyze the quality of all the websites linking to you and the backlinks you are getting by checking the domain authority, page authority, spam score, and their relevance to your website. 

All of this will help you eliminate low-quality links and maintain a healthy backlink profile.

Conclusion

Okay, so this was the complete blog on “backlinks profile”.

Now that you know what a backlinks profile is, why it is important, what a healthy profile looks like, and how to analyze it, it’s time for you to take action. 

Use the tools mentioned above to analyze your backlinks profile and make changes that you want, to boost your journey towards higher SEO rankings.

If you are looking for an expert service that is dedicated to building links to your website, you can always go for SERP Forge and contact us.

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