to Perform a Backlink Audit in 30 Minutes or Less! //

Nothing beats a great backlink. Google also considers backlinks when determining its ranking algorithm.

Low-quality backlinks can be just as damaging to your website as high-quality ones. Getting quality backlinks can be a challenge.

Backlink audits can help with these issues. In this post, I will show you how to perform a backlink analysis so that you can:

• Maintain a positive online presence
• Google Rankings: How to get a higher ranking
• Maintain optimum site health

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

• 
  What exactly is a Backlink Audit?
  
• 
  Why Backlink Audits are Important
  
• 
  How to do a backlink audit
  
• 
  How you can do a free backlink audit with Google Search Console
  
• 
  How do you perform a backlink analysis with an SEO tool
  

What is a Backlink Audit?

Backlink audits provide a detailed analysis and report of all the links pointing at your website. The report will show you which domains are linking to your website, and which pages specifically are receiving the links. It will also include details that help you evaluate the quality of the links such as the IP address, categories, anchor texts, types (follow or no follow), and authority score.

The majority, if you don’t all, of the backlink audit software will provide these insights, and action items which can be completed directly in the report. For example, whitelisting, or disavowing.

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Why do a backlink audit?

Backlinks are one of the top Google ranking factors. A backlink audit is therefore a must for those who want to maintain their best ranking. Let’s dig deeper to see why this is good for SEO.

• Identify link opportunities: Building beneficial links is just as important as eliminating harmful ones. Backlink audits can help you identify websites that are worth contacting for a more deliberate initiative. You can also audit a site’s link profile to identify broken or toxic links, and then offer your own as a replacement.
• Troubleshoot anomalies in traffic: There are many factors that can cause spikes or dips in performance, including backlinks. You would be surprised how much traffic can come from a subset of links, such as a region or site. These backlinks can be affected by algorithmic, privacy, or policy changes, causing large fluctuations in the traffic.
• Avoid Google Penalties: In the name of EEAT Google has methods of detecting unnatural links obtained through black-hat SEO practices. A backlink audit will help you avoid the Google penalties even if you are not doing any of these things intentionally.
• Don’t miss out on traffic: An audit of your backlinks will show you if there are broken links to your website and if so, how much traffic is missing.
• Remove harmful links:When Google associates you with a website that links to you it builds a link between you and the site. Backlink audits will reveal all of your toxic links, those that are from low-credibility or spammy sites. You’ll need to remove them or disavow them.

How to perform a backlinks audit in five steps

You can easily assess your website’s backlinks using this five-step procedure.

1. Select your tool

You can do a backlinks audit on your website in two ways. Google Search Console is the first option. It’s free but only provides a general overview. This is best used for smaller sites or to achieve a specific goal.

Second, you can use an tool such as Ahrefs and Semrush. These tools may be paid but they will give you the insights you need to correct mistakes, exploit opportunities, troubleshoot abnormalities, and optimize your results. Later in this post, I will share the steps for both methods.

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2. Know your metrics

Even the most basic audit report will leave you in a state of confusion if you don’t understand backlink lingo. Here are some key data points you should look for when performing a backlink analysis:

• The number of backlinks. Quantity is not as important as quality, but it can still be useful to compare your position with competitors.
• The number of domains referring to your website: This will always be lower than the total number of links, as one domain may link multiple times.
• Authority score: Also known as Domain Authority this is a measure for a site’s credibility based on a number of EEAT factors, including backlinks. You can see the Authority Scores of sites that link to yours as well as your Authority Score.

• Top linked page: Your site’s pages with the most links.
• Top linking Domains:The websites which link to you most.
• Link Velocity:How much new backlinks are you gaining every week?
• Link Toxicity: Measure of the number of harmful links pointing at your site. This includes links from sites with low authority or that are harmful.

3. You can also assess

A healthy backlinks profile will have a mixture of anchor texts (branded and unbranded, keyword-based and non-keyword-based, for example), and Authority Scores of referring domains. It shows that these links were earned ethically and organically over time. The internet can be a very wild place, despite all your efforts. You should assess your links’ quality to ensure they reflect your trustworthiness and efforts.

4. Take Action

Your backlink assessment can lead to a number of action items. Here are a few examples.

• Whitelist backlinks of high quality Mark these backlinks to be safe, reliable, or sites that are worth contacting for more opportunities.
• Remove harmful links:Where appropriate, contact sites to remove harmful links.
• Disavow harmful links: You can submit a list of disavows in Google Search Console if you have many harmful backlinks, or if you cannot get a site to remove its link. Disavow means to tell Google to ignore or disassociate those links from your website. For more information, visit Google’s disavowing link page.
• Fix broken links: Contact the domain that refers you to fix broken backlinks or to create redirects.

• Identify the best and worst pages. Your most linked pages will help you to develop your internal link strategy. You can also use these pages to identify strategies that other pages should adopt to succeed. You’ll also want to determine which pages you should increase the number of backlinks.

5. Check and maintain

After you have completed all your actions, run the audit tool to check if there are any changes in your score. Schedule regular crawls of your backlinks, and make sure you set up notifications when there are new links, broken backlinks, or lost backlinks.

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How to perform a backlinks audit using Google Search Console

Follow these steps to do a Google Search Console backlink audit:

1. Go to Search Console (search.google.com/search-console)
2. Click on the links in the left panel
3. There are four lists to choose from:
   • Top links pages (external).
   • Top linked pages (internal).
   • Text linked at the top (ext.)
   • Top Linking Sites (Ext)
4. Click on the list that you wish to view (see below).
5. Click on export (optional but useful if you wish to view the spreadsheet and create columns for statuses and actions).

Take a look at these lists in more detail:

Top links pages (external).

The list is ordered by the number of backlinks (incoming links) and linking sites. These two numbers differ because a site may link to your page multiple times.

You can see in the example below that Hatch’s homepage has the most links (17,040), out of 328 total sites.

It is also possible to click on a specific page and view which websites link to it. You may find it useful to know your top referrers.

• Send them additional, more targeted requests
• Find similar sites to yours that could add value through a link.
• In the event of an increase in traffic, rule out low-quality or spam sites.

Top Linking Sites (External)

This list shows you which sites link the most to you. In this analysis, we can see that the top three sites are Woodfordbros.com, Pellabranch.com, and sunshinecontractingcorp.com. You may or may not be interested in what these sites are linking to.

Text for top linking (external).

The list of anchor texts used to link your website is displayed in the top list. This is a ranking, not a specific metric. Our top three linked text includes “powered by hatch” which makes sense since we offer a chat widget on customer websites, “hatch,” and “www.usehatchapp.com.”

Top linked pages (internal).

Top linked pages (internal), orders your website pages based on how many links there are from other pages of your site. Internal linking is important for SEO and the user experience.

You can also click on any target link to see the pages that link to it.

How to perform a backlinks audit using an SEO tool

The second method of performing a backlink analysis is by using an SEO tool. Ahrefs, which was originally a backlink tool, is renowned for its best backlink analysis. For a standard backlink analysis any tool will do. Semrush will be used in this example.

Semrush can be used to perform a backlink analysis. You can find detailed instructions on Semrush’s page:

1. Enter your domain
2. Configure your settings. Included are:
   • Campaign Scope: You can choose to cover all of the root domains, only the www version or the non-www version.
   • Brand Settings:You define what is a brand name. Use hatchapp or the hatch app as an example.
   • Domain Categories: Selecting categories can help you measure the relevance of links to your website.
   • Countries of interest:This will help you identify the countries from which your audience is most likely to be able to benefit.

3. Connect to Google Search Console by following the steps.
4. View your report. View your report. You’ll be presented with an overview page which displays key insights and metrics for you (covered above) and tabs to dive deeper. Export and filter as required. Consult the report interpretation provided by your tool. Here’s Semrush backlink audit overview as an example.

Add a backlink audit to your list of tasks today

Google’s algorithm is heavily influenced by backlinks, but simply producing quality content that will attract links won’t be enough. Regular backlink audits are essential to a proactive, informed strategy that puts quality first. Follow the tips and tools in this article to maintain your site’s reputation and ranking.

How to perform a backlinks audit in 5 steps:

1. Select your tool
2. Know your metrics
3. You can also assess
4. Take Action
5. Check and maintain

How to do a full backlink audit in 30 minutes (or less!) The post How to Do a Full Backlink Audit in 30 Minutes (or Less!) appeared first on WordStream.