To achieve a high ranking on Google for your website, create web pages that provide researchers with what they are looking for. You need to show that your pages are reliable. If you can accomplish this, you will increase the organic search traffic to your site.
What is a backlink audit?
A backlink audit is a systematic review of other websites that link back to your own site. The goal of a backlink audit is to identify ways you can improve your link profile by pinpointing toxic backlinks to remove or opportunities to obtain new links.
A comprehensive backlink audit assesses the quality and quantity of incoming links. A link to your site from a reputable site is more beneficial for improving your search engine ranking than a link from a poorly known blog.
The audit also examines the distribution of backlinks across pages. A website that only has links to the homepage is considered less valuable than one that has links distributed across different pages, signaling to search engines that many pages of the site provide useful content.
Why is a backlink audit important?
Your website’s link profile is crucial for achieving high rankings in search engine results. A comprehensive backlink audit can help improve it in three ways: identifying opportunities, recovering lost links, and disavowing toxic links.
Identifying opportunities
Often, websites gain organic links without link-building campaigns or strategies. They typically have links that the website owner is unaware of. However, site owners can use these existing links to inform their link-building strategy. As a marketer, if you obtain high-quality organic links pointing to your site, this signals a significant opportunity to focus on the type of successful content.
Recovering lost links
A good backlink audit not only reveals the links you have but also shows the links you’ve recently gained and importantly, the links you’ve recently lost. Websites lose links for various reasons. Some lost links may be gone forever, but there are other links you can recover.
For example, you may lose links when a website shuts down or an article is removed. These links are unlikely to be recovered. However, sometimes you lose a link due to a content change on a website that includes a typo in the URL, or includes an old version of your page, or forgets to include a link in the new version. This is more common than you might think. In these cases, you can reach out to the site and ask them to update the link. This part of the backlink audit is one of the easiest ways to maintain and enhance your backlink profile.
Disavowing toxic links
Generally, backlinks from other high-quality websites improve your link profile in the eyes of search engines. But if your site acquires toxic links from harmful sites or receives links by paying publishers, it can negatively affect your ranking. Paying for links goes against Google’s and other search engines’ terms of service.
Toxic link accumulation can occur even if you follow the best link-building strategies to enhance your site’s ranking in search engines. For instance, you can become a victim of negative SEO when someone else – usually a competitor – purchases toxic links for your domain to undermine your backlink profile.
A backlink audit can help identify negative SEO attacks and reveal toxic or paid links. Once identified, you can disavow harmful links on Google and other search engines.
Tools
For Backlink Audit
Although Google Search Console and other free tools can reveal a sample of your backlinks, conducting a comprehensive backlink audit requires a tool capable of crawling the web, similar to search engines. Unfortunately, these tools often come at a high cost.
Here are three popular options:
Ahrefs
It is one of the comprehensive SEO tools, but its primary focus is on backlinks – even its name refers to the HTML of the link, starting with <a href=“yourlinkhere.com”>.
It offers a wide range of backlink audit features, including overall profile viewing, filtering features, broken link reports, competitor reports, and their proprietary 1-100 property ranking index, which has become an industry standard as a summary of backlink quality.
Best for: SEO professionals and marketers with intermediate knowledge of SEO.
Pricing: Starts from $99 per month.
Semrush
Semrush is considered the best-known tool in SEO, famous for its comprehensive feature set that includes extensive SEO analysis, digital ad monitoring, social media analysis, and much more.
Unlike other tools that require you to review multiple reports to prepare your backlink audit, Semrush features a one-click backlink audit tool that automatically gathers and displays relevant backlink information.
Best for: Marketers managing multiple marketing channels, including SEO.
Pricing: Starts from $129 per month.
Moz
Moz is known in the SEO world for its Whiteboard Friday educational content series, and it is a powerful SEO tool in its own right.
Moz’s backlink audit features are not as robust as the other tools mentioned here, but it offers reliable link checking, an easy-to-use interface, and its domain authority rating to summarize backlink profiles. It also offers more accessible pricing and free tool options, such as its link explorer.
Best for: Marketers with basic SEO knowledge.
Pricing: Starts from $69 per month.
How to Conduct a Backlink Audit
Conducting a backlink audit is straightforward. It can take between one hour and twenty hours to complete, depending on your SEO expertise and the size of your site. Here are the steps:
1. Choose the Right Tool
The right tool for your backlink audit depends on your SEO expertise, budget, and other SEO and marketing needs. Ahrefs, SemRush, and Moz are the most common choices.
2. Measure Your Backlink Profile
Use your backlink audit tool to review and record the following information about your backlink profile:
- Domain authority / overall domain rating
- Total backlinks
- Total referring domains
- Number of backlinks per page for your top 10 pages by traffic
Optional: Obtain the same figures for your top two to three competitors.
3. Look for Opportunities
Review your backlink list to find ideas on how to gain similar links. You are looking for links you have earned organically that can be replicated. Opportunities include press coverage, partner pages, listings in directories, or citations in blog posts.
Most backlink audit tools provide filtering options to make this process easier. For example, you can filter your backlink report to display only links from sites with higher authority than yours or links to your product pages.
4. Look for Broken and Lost Links
Backlink audit reports include automated reports for links you recently lost and those that go to a 404 page (indicating that the page does not exist).
Do
By recording these links, set up a plan to recover them. This may involve contacting the site that no longer links to you or updating redirects on your website to redirect the lost links.
5. Searching for Toxic Links
Most backlink auditing tools provide automated reports to identify toxic links. These reports may be labeled as “spam scores” or “toxicity scores”.
Export these links to a .txt file and disavow them in Google Webmaster Tools.
6. Summarizing Required Actions
Once you have compiled your tasks from the backlink audit, address broken or lost links and leverage new backlink opportunities.
Your backlink audit is complete by summarizing all actions that emerged. It can help to break the work into quick wins, such as updating 301 redirects, and long-term strategies, such as contributing guest posts to blogs.
Are All Backlinks Relevant to SEO?
Some backlinks are not a factor in SEO. A backlink audit focuses exclusively on links to your website that search engines consider relevant to your site’s authority. Search engines do not evaluate links from social media, email, or text messages, so these links are not included in a typical audit. Links pointing to your site from news sources, blog posts, and partner pages are considered important.
Links that are relevant to search engines are called “dofollow links”. Most external links are dofollow by default. Links that are irrelevant to search engines (such as links on social media sites) are marked by the social media platform as “nofollow links,” discouraging users from posting links on their platforms for SEO purposes.
Frequently Asked Questions About Backlink Auditing
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks, unlike internal links that connect pages within your website, are a link from another website to yours. Backlinks indicate trust in search engines.
How Can I Monitor Backlinks?
The best way to monitor your site’s backlinks is by using an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, but you can also monitor backlinks – although less effectively – using Google Search Console.
Are There Negative Effects of Having Bad Backlinks?
Having a large number of bad backlinks to your site poses the risk that search engines will consider your site untrustworthy and negatively affect your ranking in search results. This might lead to ranking drops or, in more severe cases, manual actions that significantly reduce your site’s visibility in search results.
Do Backlinks Help with SEO?
Yes. Backlinks indicate trust in search engines, and having more high-quality backlinks is closely associated with higher rankings in search engine results.
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