Let me show you how to do a backlink audit in just four easy steps. You can finish it in as little as 30 minutes because I’ve got everything laid out for you, from picking your tool to spotting fake backlinks.
I’ve helped many organizations improve their search engine rankings with effective link building and audits.
Follow these simple steps to boost your site’s traffic and improve your organic rankings. Your site could be next!
What is Link Audit?
An SEO link audit is a detailed check-up that helps us find backlink issues and focus on building good links. Link audits are as important for offsite SEO as regular audits are for onsite SEO. The link audit process includes several parts, like guest posting, fixing broken links, analyzing competitor backlinks, checking anchor text, reviewing backlinks, ensuring link relevancy, and looking at site-wide link distribution.
Why is Link Audit Important?
This SEO process checks every link on your website, both internal and external. Links help improve your search engine ranking. Having a strong set of high-quality, relevant links can boost your site’s overall ranking. Regular link audits are important to remove bad and spammy links, keeping your website healthy and strong.
Steps to Follow while Doing Link Audit
Create a clear plan for your link audit. First, understand why you’re doing it.
Did Google give you a manual penalty?
Did a recent update cause a drop in your website’s traffic?
Or are you just doing a health check to remove bad links and reduce risk?
Knowing the purpose will help guide your audit.
To clean up backlinks, we would collect data from tools like Search Console, Ahrefs, and Moz Link Explorer.
If you’re looking to increase your backlinks, we’ll analyze your top competitors based on target links and keywords. Here are the steps we’ll take:
Also Read: Why Disavowing Links is Important
How to Conduct a Link Audit?
Steps 1: Link Consolidation and Quality Check
Since link cleansing is the main goal, start by gathering backlinks from different sources using tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Moz Link Explorer. Next, check the quality of these links using standard metrics to make sure there are no fake or low-quality links left.
Step 2: Making Link Audit a Recursive Process
The worst time to do a link audit is when you’re already in trouble. Don’t wait for a Penguin update to wreck your search rankings or for an email about “unnatural links” to show up. Conduct a link audit right away.
A thorough link audit is crucial for any digital marketing strategy. Building high-quality links is key to boosting your traffic and rankings. If Google spots manipulative behavior in backlinks, it can hit you with Manual Link Spam penalties.
If your goal is to recover from a penalty, focus on Google Search Console and look for areas that break webmaster guidelines or involve “link schemes.” If you’re setting up a new website, use this data to find opportunities and counteract any competitive edge a rival site might have.
After the audit, you’ll sort links into categories like spam, nofollow, dofollow, natural, and unnatural. This process helps prevent links from being added to spammy sites and removes existing spam links.
Natural Links
Natural link building is all about creating great content, like blogs, articles, photos, videos, and infographics, that attracts links on its own. When you have top-quality content, you don’t have to push or promote links—good content gets shared by marketers who find it valuable. This way, both the content creator’s site and the shared site benefit from the backlinks.
Unnatural Links
Unnatural links are those that weren’t added to a page by the site owner in an editorial way and could break Google’s rules. Google defines unnatural links as things like text ads that pass PageRank, links with optimized anchor text in press releases or articles on other sites, links in forum comments, links scattered across footers or templates on various sites, and links to low-quality directories or bookmark sites.
Nofollow Links
A nofollow link doesn’t help with improving a page’s ranking or boost its PageRank. It basically tells search engines to ignore that link when determining search rankings. So, a nofollow tag acts like a signal to search engines to not consider that link.
Dofollow Links
Dofollow links let search engines find and follow your website. If a webmaster links to your page with a dofollow link, search engines can visit your site. To get the most out of dofollow links, use relevant keywords in the anchor text. So, whenever you link to another site or page, make sure to use the targeted keyword as the anchor text.
Spam links are added to websites to try to mess with search engine results. The more inbound links a site has, the higher it can rank in search results. Typically, spam links are hidden in site files or plain text databases.
These spam links can be related to various areas like adult content, online casinos, ringtone and music downloads, movie downloads, pharmaceutical sales, and counterfeit designer goods.
Step 3: Identifying the Unnatural Links
How do you find out which Links have to be Removed when an ‘Unnatural Links’ Message is Received?
It’s helpful, though not required, to use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and Google Analytics (GA). If you’re trying to recover from a penalty, having access to these tools is crucial. You might also let a third party have restricted access if needed.
If you don’t have a GWT account yet, sign up, add the code to your website, and verify it. Then, go to your website, check your traffic and links, get the most recent links, and export them to Google Docs or CSV.
Gathering data from GWT is important when trying to lift a penalty. Links added around the time of the penalty are usually the problem. So, you need to fix any link that breaks webmaster guidelines by using the disavow tool or removing it.
Step 4: Analyzing the Link Data
Links that show up on a site but aren’t listed in Google’s index should be checked and possibly removed. This could indicate a quality issue. To check this, use the site command. If the website is indexed, you’ll see one result; if not, you’ll see a different result. Sometimes, a wrong robots.txt file can stop even a good site from being indexed. This often happens when a site finishes development but the robots.txt file isn’t updated, blocking search engines from indexing the page. A manual review is essential in such cases. Also, be cautious with links from sites that have malware or virus warnings.
Look out for links from link networks. These are groups of websites that share things like registrars, IP addresses, DNS names, analytics, and affiliate codes. If a bunch of websites have the same IP address, they might also share other link network traits.
This also applies to paid links. If you’re trying to recover from a manual penalty, you need to remove all sponsored links. Google’s paid link detection team can find them. After the Penguin update, there are additional link guidelines to follow, including avoiding certain types of questionable links.
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