Everything You Need To Know: Backlink Audit
Understanding your link profile requires conducting a backlink audit.
They emphasise:
Reasons why other sites connect to yours
Web sites they refer you to
The presence of spam links and similar issues
Using this data, you may construct safer link-building methods and reduce the likelihood of receiving a Google penalty.
In this essay, we’ll go through the eight main components of a successful backlink audit.
A Backlink Audit: What Is It?
A backlink audit is an in-depth evaluation of the external links that lead to your website. It is possible to locate opportunities for future link building and eliminate potentially damaging links by evaluating your backlinks.
When taking over a new website, the first thing you should do is conduct a backlink assessment. It lays everything out for you, so you can spot and correct any problems before moving further.
Before beginning a link-building campaign, you can use a backlink audit to establish a baseline for your website’s performance indicators. By establishing a baseline, you can evaluate the success of your link-building efforts.
If you already have a site but haven’t analysed it for broken links, a backlink audit is something to think about. Opportunities, such as blog entries that have naturally generated a large number of connections, may present themselves to you that you were previously unaware of.
Why Should You Conduct a Backlink Audit?
A backlink audit should be conducted for the following three reasons:
Compare Your Site to Others
An audit of your website’s backlinks will reveal crucial details about its link profile. Your website can utilise this as a reference point.
Make use of the information to evaluate the efficacy of your link-building initiatives. You can also use it to analyse how your website stacks up against the competition.
Find Broken Connections
Google penalises sites with bad link profiles. Penalties can occur if you have an excessive amount of external links from link farms or PBNs, regardless of whether you developed them knowingly or not.
Google’s system is becoming better at ignoring these connections, yet some still manage to sneak through. If you find that removing links improves your rankings, that may be the case.
A backlink audit will reveal links that should be avoided. You can then use this data to determine if the links are having a detrimental impact on your site. You can take action to delete the links if this is the case.
Discover Open Doors
To discover backlink opportunities, a backlink audit is also necessary. And the audit’s findings should inform subsequent promotional efforts.
You can observe, for instance, which articles on your site receive the most inbound links. More of this type of content can lead to more links.
An 5-Step Procedure for Conducting a Backlink Audit
Compare Your Site to Others
Getting a bird’s-eye perspective of your backlink profile is the first step in any backlink audit. You can use this data to evaluate the current state of your website and track future progress.
Some things you should look into are:
Quantity of Inbound Links
How many other sites link to yours is represented here. Include all links, even those that originate from the same site.
Domain Counts That Link Here
How many other websites link to yours. Do not count backlinks from the same domain more than once.
Quantity of Follow Links
Google only takes into account backlinks from sites that allow for it (called “dofollow”). In comparison to nofollow links, their value is greatly enhanced.
The Credibility of Your Website
Depending on the number and quality of inbound links, most SEO tools will assign your site a domain authority score. You may quickly assess your site’s backlink profile using these indicators.
Learn More About the Material That Is Shared
The next step is to identify the pages on your site that are already receiving inbound links.
This data is crucial because:
- Linkable asset outreach campaigns should target articles that readers are currently linking to.
- Making material that’s similar to what’s already generating links is an effective strategy.
- Using internal links, you can channel traffic from your most popular pages to your most valuable content.
Search for Different Types of Links
Backlinks can be created in a variety of methods. Understanding the variety of inbound links to your site is useful for planning future initiatives.
Whether you’ve recently purchased the domain or are taking over SEO duties from a prior organization, this is a crucial first step.
under Ahrefs, your links may be found under the “Backlinks” submenu of the “Backlink Profile” tab. If you want to see the most reliable links first, you can sort them by DR. Or you may narrow down the results to only include dofollow links.
Consider Potential Content Revamps
A backlink audit can show you where you can improve your traffic by updating old content. The goal is to locate online pages that have been linked to extensively yet receive little organic traffic.
The page can be refreshed and optimised for a different term to increase its chances of being found in search results.
To begin, return to the Ahrefs top pages by links report.
The estimated amount of organic traffic to each page is displayed in a drop-down menu once you select the page.
Recognize 404 Not Found Errors
When a user clicks a link on your site and is taken to a page that no longer exists, a 404 error will be generated.
When a user clicks on the link, they should be taken to the content they were looking for, but instead they are met with an error. A 404 error page is negative for link building since it wastes the value of the link from the referring page.
