Are you having trouble auditing your backlinks? Have you recently gained a new SEO user? Or maybe you’ve been given the job of managing SEO for your company’s website. Hence, if you need to undertake a backlink audit or want to restore and modify it, that doesn’t mean you want to buy something that is about to fall.
So, you need to analyze it for quality and other potentially costly issues before parting with a penny of your hard-earned cash. Fortunately, there are simple DIY backlink audits that can be completed in just 40 minutes. Let’s go check them out!
What Exactly Is A Backlink Audit?
Backlink audits are methods for driving traffic to a website by exploiting website flaws, allowing a site to rank better than it should via “organic” search tactics. Moreover, search engine algorithms have become aware of such attempts to trick the system and improve search results. Because sites like Google have created algorithms to punish this kind of behavior, a few of these link operations are no longer as effective as they previously were.
How To Audit A Backlink In 5 Easy Steps
By combining a new backlink database with Google and Majestic integrations, as well as hazardous link assessment, you can enhance your backlink portfolio in 5 simple steps.
Step 1: Compare Your Backlinks Those Of Your Competitors
This step is optional. However, it may provide you with some insight into your rivals’ link-building strategies and assist you in giving your profile the most proper assessment. To do this, enter your domain as well as 1-4 competitors’ domains into Backlink Analytics. Then, you’ll see the ‘Overview’ page that contains all of the information you need to determine if your link development plan is on track.
Step 2: Locate And Analyze Each Of Your Backlinks
Now that you’ve determined if your backlink portfolio is relevant to the competition, it’s essential to identify the significant problems that are keeping you from defeating them. You should start by looking for fraudulent links that harm your rankings, but it is just the first step.
There are a few more things to watch for, such as essential connections that may be slipping away or holes in your connectivity plan. A free version can help you discover and analyze your backlinks. So, remember to navigate to the Backlink Audit tool, create a Project, and configure it (enter your target keywords, categories, and competitors associated with your domain). This allows you to analyze the relevance of each link.
Step 3: Determine Whether To Disavow Or Remove Negative Links
Getting rid of the harmful backlinks is the next step. That may be accomplished in two ways:
contacting the referring website owner and requesting that the link be removed. It is sent to the disavow list and subsequently exported to the Google Disavow tool. Hence, to avoid wasting time contacting spammers and fraudsters, split your harmful links into those you can and cannot be deleted.
Go to the Backlink Audit tool’s tab and safelist any links with a poor score of less than 45.
Then, filter the list to see your harmful links and organize them according to the significant problems you discovered in Step 2.
For example, if you have a poor high score, you must understand which connections are to blame. Because the most hazardous links are at first, you may examine their flags and filter your list to discover similar others. Unfortunately, the links you locate using this method are almost likely from websites whose owners aren’t interested in removing the link.
Step 4: Clean Up Your Backlink Portfolio
Removal
Connect your email to the ‘Delete’ page, which is where you submitted some of your harmful URLs. To request the removal of a link, customize the template. Then, the email address of the receiver will be automatically recognized or manually entered from the internet.
It is critical to adopt the proper approach when requesting a link. When contacting publishers, you must demonstrate that you are not a spambot. The message should come out as natural and courteous. You will also be able to monitor the replies in Semrush as well as your inbox. If you need a disavow in the future, use them as evidence of your efforts.
Disavowing
You can sometimes find a hyperlink or contact the website owner; otherwise, disavow is your only option. To do so, go to the ‘Disavow’ tab, export the data to a.txt file, and then submit it to the Google Disavow tool for the applicable domain.
Step 5: Look For New Opportunities To Develop Valuable Links
A backlink audit entails more than just identifying and deleting harmful backlinks. It may assist you in recognizing new possibilities for high-quality connections and improving your overall link development approach. Here are a few pointers.
- Connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console to a Backlink Audit. To provide keyword research tools with information about your referral traffic. Go to the ‘ Target Pages ‘ tab to find out which pages of your website you can improve for increased backlinks and referral traffic.
- Download the Referring Domains data from your Backlink Analytics. To your outreach list, include the respectable domains that already link to your competitors.
- Keep an eye on the Backlink Audit’s ‘Lost and Found’ report. This is necessary to ensure that you do not miss any significant changes to your backlink profile. Use the Link Building tool to contact website owners about damaged or missing links.
Conclusion
A backlink audit is simply the assessment of all connections going to your domain. It implies that you must locate them, distinguish between the bad and good ones, and initiate a plan to deal without them. You may get a list of your links from Google Webmaster Tools and carefully examine all of your connections. Nonetheless, if you operate a sizable respectable business with only a large number of referring domains, the procedure may take a long time.