What Is a Backlink Audit?

Simply put, a backlink audit is the evaluation of all links that indicate a website. Audits are carried out to find them, identify the bad and the good, and develop the appropriate strategy to deal with them.

We can download the list of links from Google Webmaster Tools and manually check all the backlinks. However, if we maintain a comprehensive, reputable website with countless referring domains, the process can take ages.

A link audit analyzes current links (also known as a link profile) and evaluates how appropriate they are for a site. Even if the links are not compromised, the site could still be underperforming. Link audits can help us size up a competitor, enhance client SEO, and much more.

Auditing a client's backlink profile will lead to insights that will support our future link-building efforts.

A backlink audit should not be difficult to do because we need to use it whenever we want. So it must be helpful if we have new customers or want to monitor some original sites, or if a client has been penalized, customer traffic has dropped, and we want to look at the situation more closely.

Need a Refresher on Backlinks?

A Backlink Audit in 5 Steps

step 1

Step 1: Benchmarking a backlink profile against competitors

This step can give us an honest insight into your competitor's "link-building strategies and help us establish the most appropriate evaluation of a customer profile.

Before you start your audit, you can do one thing: get an idea of your competitor's backlink strategy.

What to consider

Numbers of backlinks/referral domains/referral IPs estimate how high your backlink footprint is compared to the competition.
Authority score to understand how attractive your domain should be for link-building prospects.

Also, consider these details: Have we consistently built links over the years? Have things flattered for a while? Have our competitors acquired links faster than we do?

step 2

Step 2: Find and assess every backlink a client has

Let's start with the basics and answer a simple question: how many backlinks and referring domains do we have pointing to the website?

Before we do anything else in this step, we must find all links that send traffic to the site. The easiest way to do this is to use the Google Search Console or another tool to gather a list of backlinks.

Regardless of which tool you end up using, you want to watch for a few critical results:

List of backlinks
List of unhealthy/dead backlinks (i.e., backlinks that don't work)
Domain authority (DA)
Page authority (PA)

Once we have the lists from step 1 and 2, then we need to review:

Backlink types to determine which of our competitors' content is most associated with.
Link attributes to identify potential weaknesses in the profile of competitors
Refer to domains to find out if we should reach out to more domains than we do at the moment

Now that we know whether our backlink portfolio is relevant to the competition, it is time to find the most critical questions that prevent us from beating them. We should first look at the spam links that harm rankings, but that is only the first step.

There are several other aspects to keep an eye on, for example, valuable links that we could lose or the gaps in the link-building strategy.

What to look at

A high total toxic score. There are too many harmful links that point to your website.
Too high or too low total number of analyzed backlinks. If it is high and you are not creating links or publishing much content at the moment, there can be a spam attack. If it is too low, your site could be perceived as toxic by others on the web.
The number of referring domains. Too many links from one domain can cause suspicion from Google.
A high toxic score of the referring domains can result from either poor link-building or negative SEO.
A high percentage of dofollow or USG links. A natural profile cannot consist of one type of link, especially if its anchors are irrelevant.
The prevalence of money and compound anchors, which Google considers potentially toxic
An increase in gained or lost backlinks over a given period should be interpreted similarly to the numbers of analyzed backlinks.

step 3

Step 3: Decide whether to disavow or remove harmful links.

Google is better than ever at ignoring "bad" backlinks, which means we are unlikely to be automatically penalized for such occurrences.

But the influx of spammy backlinks is never a positive factor, so they can be worth disavowing. The next step is to get rid of toxic backlinks, which can be done in two ways

Reach out to the referring website the owner and ask them to delete the link (removal)
Send it to the Disavow list and export it to the Google Disavow Tool (Disavow)

Do not waste time contacting spammers and scammers; divide your toxic links into those you can remove and those you can't.

There are two types of linking penalties: manual and algorithmic.

Manual penalties occur when Google's team checks your link profile and notices something wrong. These may occur due to spam reports or something on a site that triggers a human review of the link profile.

Algorithmic penalties are applied when Penguin (the current algorithm of Google) alerts to something in the link profile.

step 4

Step 4: Clean up the backlink portfolio

Now that we have carried out a link profile audit, we can finish by creating an action plan to improve the link profile. A link audit is excellent, but it is also useless if you do nothing about it!

This step is a simple one. Produce a plan, and execute!

We can break this down into a few critical actions that might apply:

Recovering from link penalties
Fixing dead backlinks
Improving your DA and PA

step 5

Step 5: Find new ways to build valuable links.

A backlink audit is more than simply finding and removing toxic backlinks. It can help identify new opportunities to get high-quality links and improve the link-building strategy.

Building Backlink Audit