It’s beyond doubt that backlinks are one of the top ranking factors that Google considers. Even if you don’t care what others are calling you behind your back, Google does.
The same reason why, you should know what exactly others are calling you. In other words, you should have a very clear idea of your backlink profile. Not only will it help you avoid toxic backlinks, which can be detrimental to your rankings, but also give you enough insight to find opportunities to develop your brand with quality backlinks from high-quality sources.
How to do that? How to gain that insight? You must follow a clearly defined process called backlink audit.
What is a backlink audit
A backlink audit is a process to get a detailed analysis of the backlink profile of your website.
Then, you can find any bad backlinks that may potentially harm your website rankings and disavow them before that happen.
It also helps you to better understand your website – how your site is attracting high-quality links, so you can work on your site to gather more of them.
Why perform a backlink audit regularly
Backlinks are vital to your website. When relevant and high-authority websites mention you on their pages, this means a lot to Google. SERP rankings, domain authority, and a lot of other elements depend on the quality and quantity of backlinks you acquire.
However, spammy and toxic links, whether from PBN or a negative SEO attack can harm your website rankings and you may even be subject to penalties from Google.
But backlink audits are more than just being safe from harmful links. An SEO backlink audit provides you with tons of invaluable insights that you can use to better your link-building campaign.
Measure the success of your link-building campaign
You can measure the success of your link-building campaign with an SEO backlink audit. Not only the number of backlinks you have managed to acquire but also their effectiveness in your SEO strategy.
Find toxic links
A major function of a backlink profile audit is that it helps you find bad or toxic backlinks, such as from:
- Link farm or PBN
- Hacked websites
- Websites with adult or gambling content
- Sites with thin or auto-generated content
Help improve your link-building strategies
Doing a backlink audit helps you determine which of your content and pages are attracting more quality links. Therefore, you can build your link-building strategy around those. You can also do an audit of your competitor to get a fair idea of what your strategy should be.
Identify new opportunities in link-building
A thorough study of your backlink profile and those of your competitors can help you determine new link-building opportunities.
You may also find successful content from your competitors that are attracting high-quality backlinks. You can get plenty of ideas from there and build similar and better content to gain good-quality backlinks and stay ahead of the competition.
Backlink audit tools you will need
To perform a backlink audit, you’ll obviously need some tools. Thankfully, there are many tools available to help you perform a backlink audit successfully. Some of them are free with limited functionalities while others are paid where you can get a detailed backlink profile and various other metrics that’ll help you get a clear picture of what is and what you should do.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool you can use to monitor and improve your site’s performance in Google Search results. However, the backlink audit features of this tool are limited.
Features:
Links Report: Provides you valuable data on external and internal links, top linking sites, anchor text, etc.
Manual Actions: If your site has been penalized by Google, you’ll find it here.
The pros of this tool are that it is completely free to use, gives you accurate data, and has a simple interface – so apt for beginners.
However, this tool has limited features, such as you can audit only your own site. Also, the analysis and metrics are limited compared to other paid tools. It also does not show metrics like link toxicity scores.
Third-Party SEO tools
Apart from GSC, there are several third-party paid SEO tools available for backlink analysis. These SEO backlink audit tools provide detailed information about the quality, quantity, and relevance of your backlinks.
Some of the most preferred tools used by many SEO professionals are Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, and Majestic, among others.
These tools can perform the following functions:
- Find new backlinks to your site.
- Check the usage of anchor texts and keywords in backlinks.
- Identify toxic or harmful links
- Find and analyze the linking domains for authority and reliability.
- Measure your DR, toxicity score, organic traffic, etc.
How to do a backlink audit in 5 steps
Ready for a backlink audit? Here’s how to do it in 5 simple steps.
We will use the website of Neil Patel as an example.
1. Get an overall view of your backlink profile
To analyze your backlink profile you first have to know what is in it. Right? So, getting an overview is the first step.
There are several metrics you should consider in benchmarking your backlink profile, and they are:
The number of backlinks:
This refers to the total number of backlinks to your site. Consider all of them, even if they come from the same referring domain.
The number of referring domains:
Next, comes the number of referring domains to your site. If a domain links to your site multiple times – count it only once.
Link acquisition rate:
This will show you how fast your website has been acquiring links over time. Look for unnatural patterns or spikes that could be a result of dubious practices or negative SEO attacks. Here we don’t see any.
Website authority:
Now, check the Domain Authority of your website. Most SEO tools will allow you to find that.
The number of dofollow and nofollow links:
The final thing to check is the number of dofollow and nofollow links pointing to your website. Dofollow links are considered to be more valuable in link-building as they are thought to pass more link juice. However, nofollow links can benefit SERP performance.
2. Review anchor text
Next, check the anchor texts that are linking to your website. Search engines review the anchor texts to gauge what your website is about. A relevant anchor text with give the engine a clear idea of what your website deals with.
So, one of your blog pages should be linked to relevant keywords and their variations. And, branded keywords should be used as anchor texts for one of your money pages.
So, you must locate irrelevant anchors. A paid SEO tool like Ahrefs will show you the Anchor Text report, where you should look for irrelevant and suspicious links. For example, if you have a shoe business your backlinks shouldn’t have anchor texts like ‘Viagra’ or ‘Cassino.’
Another thing to look out for is keyword-rich anchor texts – one that includes exact keyword matches. While that is not exactly wrong Google might find them suspicious if the keywords don’t appear naturally in the text.
3. Identify and disavow links
Now comes the part where you need to run through your backlinks and check for potential spam.
To do that:
- Check the anchor texts for irrelevant or spammy terms
- Check the links from low DR websites and look for potential spam.
- Analyze your link acquisition history and check for spikes that could indicate something wrong like a negative SEO attack.
- Check your ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domains) distribution and look for an unnaturally high number of links from other countries which may indicate spam. For example, if your website is in English and a large number of links are from Japan, it may indicate spam.
Once you find them, it’s not necessary that you disavow them.
As you can see in Google’s own words:
As explained, Google’s algorithm is quite smart at detecting spammy backlinks and they do not have much impact on your rankings. So, disavowing them is not necessary.
However, if you have been practicing unethical SEO practices like buying backlinks from link farms or using PBN to acquire a large number of links, then disavowing might be necessary. If you think Google might penalize you, you should disavow the links.
4. Identify broken links
According to Ahrefs, at least 66.5% of links to sites are dead or have rotten in the last 9 years. So, the fact of the matter is that backlinks do rot. Considering a backlink costs you thousands of dollars, you might be losing a lot every year.
Use a tool like Ahrefs which shows you links to your 404 pages, you can reach out to the owner and suggest a replacement.
5. Look for link types
After you have gone through your backlink profile, you can and should dig a bit deeper and analyze the types of backlinks you attract.
You want to do this for two reasons. First, you want a natural mix of backlinks. Second, you want to find out the type of link-building strategy that works best for you.
Analyzing the report for your site, you can build your content and strategy accordingly.
Final words
An SEO backlink audit is a sure-shot way to find and mitigate risks associated with bad backlinks. As backlinks form a major part of any SEO strategy, maintaining a healthy backlink profile for your website is important. And, a backlink audit gives you enough insights to do that right.
However, if you find the backlink audit process complex or want to avoid the hassles of doing it by yourself, you can contact us. We are a renowned agency specializing in providing high-quality backlinks for your website and have helped hundreds of businesses to date and would be happy to help you as well.
FAQs
How often do you need to perform a backlink audit?
Ideally, you should do a backlink audit every 3 to 6 months. But if you find a sudden drop in rankings, or have been notified by Google of a penalty, you should do your audit sooner.
What are the best backlink audit tools?
Google Search Console is a free tool you can use for backlink audits. There are also paid tools from Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, etc. that will give you a good amount of metrics that you can use to maintain a healthy backlink profile.
How to identify toxic or harmful links?
Toxic backlinks are often associated with low DA sites, unrelated or spammy sites, and high link acquisition rates (unnatural spikes in link acquisition).
