Backlinks: 6 Ways to Manage Your Backlinks
In order for your website to rank high on Google, you need to create web pages that provide searchers with the information they want. To do this, you need to prove that your pages are trustworthy. When you achieve this goal, you will increase your organic search traffic.
Google evaluates your trustworthiness through your backlink profile (links from other websites to your site). Backlinks signal to users that the pages linked to your website are valuable. The first step to improving your backlink profile is to perform a backlink audit.
What is a backlink audit?
A backlink audit is a systematic review of the links that other websites link to your site. The goal of a backlink audit is to find ways to improve your link profile by removing harmful backlinks or identifying opportunities to gain new backlinks.
A full link audit evaluates both the quality and quantity of backlinks. Backlinks from trusted sites are more beneficial for SEO than backlinks from lesser-known blogs.
The audit also examines the distribution of backlinks by page. A website with backlinks only on the homepage is valued less than a website with backlinks spread across multiple pages. This signals to search engines that multiple pages provide useful content.
Why Backlink Audits Are Important
- Identifying Opportunities
- Restore link
- Abandon harmful links
A website’s backlink profile plays a vital role in ranking high in search engine results. A thorough backlink audit can help improve your backlink profile in three ways:
Identifying Opportunities
Websites often get backlinks organically without any link building campaign or strategy. Often times, website owners have backlinks that they never knew existed. However, owners can use these existing links to build a link building strategy. As a marketer, getting high-quality organic backlinks to your site is a great opportunity to strengthen your successful content type.
For example, if you run a vegan meal prep service, you may be mentioned on a blog by a local vegan blogger who is promoting their favorite local food options. After recognizing this in your backlink audit, you can start a link building campaign by offering free meals to other vegan bloggers to get more reviews and backlinks.
Restore link
A good backlink audit will show you not only the links you have, but also the recently acquired and important links. Websites can lose links for a variety of reasons. Some lost backlinks are gone forever, but some can be regained.
For example, if a website goes down or deletes an article, you may lose a link. In such cases, it is difficult to get the link back. However, sometimes a website changes its content, making a typo in the URL, including an outdated version of a page, or forgetting to include a link in the new version. In such cases, you can contact the website and ask them to update the link. This part of the backlink audit is one of the easiest ways to maintain and improve your backlink profile.
Abandon harmful links
In general, backlinks from other genuine, high-quality websites will improve your backlink profile in the eyes of search engines. However, spammy backlinks from malicious websites or links obtained by paying publishers can have a negative impact on your rankings. Buying links is against the terms of service of Google and other search engines.
Even if you follow the best link building strategies to improve your site’s SEO, you can still accumulate toxic links. For example, you can become a victim of a negative SEO attack where someone else (usually a competitor) buys toxic backlinks for your domain, weakening your backlink profile.
A backlink audit can identify negative SEO attacks and find harmful or paid links. After identifying these links, you can disavow them from Google and other search engines.
Backlink Audit Tool
- Ahrefs
- SemRush
- Moz
Free tools like Google Search Console can provide backlink samples, but to perform a thorough backlink audit, you need a tool that can crawl the entire internet, similar to a search engine. These tools often come with a hefty price tag.
Here are three popular options:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a multi-purpose SEO tool, but its main focus is on backlinks. The name itself comes from "<a href='yourlinkhere.com'>", which indicates the beginning of an HTML link.
It offers the most comprehensive backlink auditing capabilities and includes unique features such as full profile views, filtering capabilities, broken link reports, competitor reports, and a 1–100 Domain Rating (DR) score that briefly indicates the quality of your backlink profile.
Suitable for: SEO professionals and marketers with intermediate level SEO knowledge.
Pricing: Starting at $99 per month
Semrush
Semrush is one of the most well-known SEO tools, boasting a wide range of features including comprehensive SEO analysis, digital advertising monitoring, and social media analytics.
Unlike other tools, Semrush provides a one-click backlink audit tool that automatically collects and displays relevant backlink information without requiring you to review multiple reports.
Ideal for: Marketers who manage multiple marketing channels, including SEO.
Pricing: Starting at $129 per month
Moz
Moz is best known in the SEO world for their educational content series called Whiteboard Fridays , which is itself a powerful SEO tool.
Moz’s backlink audit feature isn’t as powerful as some of the other SEO tools listed here, but it does offer a reliable link checking tool, an easy-to-use interface, and a unique domain authority (DA) score that summarizes your backlink profile. It also offers more affordable starting prices and free tool options like Link Explorer .
Suitable for: Marketers with beginner SEO knowledge
Pricing: Starting at $69 per month
How to thank backlinks
- Select a tool
- Setting link profile criteria
- Scanning for Opportunities
- Scan for broken and lost links
- Scan for harmful links
- Summarizing the action items
Running a backlink audit is relatively simple. Depending on your SEO experience and the size of your site, it can take anywhere from 1 to 20 hours to complete. Here are the steps:
1. Select a tool
The right backlink audit tool will depend on your SEO experience, budget, and other SEO and marketing needs. Ahrefs , SemRush , and Moz are some of the most popular options.
2. Setting link profile criteria
Use our backlink audit tool to review and record the following about your link profile:
- Domain Authority/Ranking Score
- Total number of links
- Total number of referral domains
- Number of links per page for top 10 pages
Optional: Check the same numbers for your top 2-3 competitors.
3. Scanning for Opportunities
Review your backlink list to find ideas for similar links. Look for links that you have earned organically that can be repeated. Opportunities include press releases, partner pages, directory listings, and quotes in blog posts.
4. Scan for broken and lost links
The Backlink Audit report includes an automatically generated report of recently lost links and links that lead to 404 pages (page not found).
Make a note of these links and make a plan to get them back. You may be able to contact the website that no longer includes the link or update the website's redirects to redirect the 404 links.
5. Scan for harmful links
Most backlink audit tools provide automated reports to identify bad links. Depending on the tool you use, this may be called a “spam score” or “bad link index.”
Export these links to a .txt file and disavow them in Google Webmaster Tools.
6. Summarizing the action items
After you've sorted out all the things you need to do in gratitude, fix any broken or lost links and secure new link opportunities.
To complete your backlink audit, summarize all the action items you found. It can be helpful to divide your tasks into two categories: quick wins, like updating 301 redirects, and long-term strategies, like suggesting guest contributions to your blog.
Are all backlinks relevant to SEO?
Some backlinks do not affect SEO. A backlink audit focuses only on links that search engines consider relevant to the credibility of your site. Search engines do not evaluate links from social media, email, or SMS, so these links are not included in a typical audit. Links 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 backlinks by default. Links that are not relevant to search engines (e.g. links from social media sites) are tagged as "nofollow" links by social media platforms to prevent users from posting links on the platform solely for SEO purposes.
Backlink Audit FAQ
What is a backlink?
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website, as opposed to internal links, which link to pages within your website. Backlinks signal trustworthiness to search engines.
How do I monitor backlinks?
The best way to monitor your site’s backlinks is to use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. You can also use Google Search Console to monitor backlinks, but it may be less effective.
Are there any negative effects to having bad backlinks?
If your site has a lot of bad backlinks, search engines will perceive your site as untrustworthy, which can negatively affect your search rankings. This can result in your rankings stagnating, and in more serious cases, manual actions that can significantly reduce your visibility in search results.
Do backlinks help SEO?
Yes, backlinks signal trust to search engines, and having more high-quality backlinks is closely related to higher rankings in search engine results.