Backlink Audit

What is Backlink Audit?

Backlink audits are one of the most important SEO measures you can take. This is because they can provide a complete overview of all of the online links that point to your website.

By undertaking a backlink audit, you can gain a better understanding of the health of your link profile and decide what, if anything, needs to change.

This means that an effective audit is partly a diagnosis and partly a chance to search for new linking opportunities.

In terms of a diagnosis, you’re looking for links that could be hurting your Google ranking. Whereas you can also identify patterns that may present an opportunity to be exploited. For example, you may be able to see gaps where competitors are earning links and you’re not.

Importance of Backlink Audits

The reason that conducting regular audits is important is because backlinks are dynamic. They’re not a ‘set and forget’ asset, and the strong links you may have earned years ago aren’t immune to rotting over time.

The websites hosting your links can sometimes experience a decline in quality. Likewise, if you’ve ever opted to buy links or deploy aggressive link-building tactics, your liabilities could sometimes sit quietly in a profile until an algorithm update or manual review surfaces them.

With this in mind, an audit can be a relatively time-efficient way of facilitating a sharp improvement in your website’s Google ranking.

How to Backlink Audit

To conduct a thorough backlink audit, you must start by pulling your full backlink data, ideally from more than one tool. Because the likes of Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Search Console offer different metrics, using multiple platforms offers a fuller picture than through any single source.

You can then assess your links for quality. Key considerations should include looking for links that appear spammy and backlinks that are carrying over-optimised anchor text that may indicate manipulation.

Once that part of the process is complete, you can then begin to separate your genuinely toxic links from those that are merely low value. Because low-quality links aren’t necessarily damaging to websites, it’s much more important to prioritise addressing the backlinks that could be harming your authority.

The next stage of the process depends on what you find. In an ideal world, your audit will be clean and will merely confirm that your pages are in good shape while uncovering a few link-building opportunities.

However, if you uncover some risks, you should approach the linking website to ask them to remove your link. This can be done by getting in touch with the site owners. If no action is taken, you can use Google’s disavow tool as a last resort. By disavowing your links, you can actively tell the search engine to ignore your worst backlinks.

Be sure to keep in mind that disavowing links can be dangerous, and if you seek to remove healthy links by mistake, it may cost you rankings. So be careful about your actions here.

Common Mistakes

One frequent mistake is that people can often run audits too regularly, or they may treat every nofollow and low-value link as something to remove.

But it’s important to note that Google is far more effective at simply ignoring weak links than in the past, so in most cases, too much disavowing is likely to do more harm than good.

The best way to conduct a backlink audit is when you have a reason to carry one out. Look out for indicators like a sudden drop in traffic that can’t be explained or cleaning up a history of bought links. Likewise, if you’re about to be acquired by another company, a quick audit can be a great way to get your pages in ship shape.

For healthy websites, a backlink audit only needs to be conducted once or twice a year at most. However, if you’re recovering from a Google penalty or have a patchy link history, you may need to get a little more hands-on with your audits and begin carefully assessing whether it’s time to disavow your links.