How to Do a Backlink Audit – Your Complete Guide

One of the most important elements of an SEO strategy is backlinking. Backlinking is one of the main criteria considered in Google’s page ranking algorithms. When you include more relevant and reliable sources on a page it increases its usefulness and value.

On the other hand, poor backlinks consist of irrelevant sources or links that refer visitors to spammy sites. When you have poor backlinks on your page it can affect its value and authority which often results in page ranking penalties.

The only way to ensure your backlinks are referring traffic to quality sites is to do a backlink audit. In this guide, we’ve given you the steps you should take to ensure all your links on your page are of the highest quality. Keep reading to find out more.

Get a Complete List of Links Integrated On Your Site

It will take you a lot of time to visit every web page or blog you’ve created to check the quality of your backlinks. Luckily, there are online tools you can use such as Google Search Console that will give you a complete list of all the links on your site.

Google Search Console provides details such as the “who links the most” category so you can see which sites are giving you the most traffic. You can also view what anchor text is being used for your link and if it’s relevant to the site it refers visitors to. Follow these quick steps to call up your links on Google Search Console:

1. Create a Google Search Console account and sign into it.
2. Click on the Links To Your Site tab.
3. Find “Top linking sites”
4. You’ll now see the total number of links you have on your website.

Evaluate Your List of Backlinks on Your Website

Once you have your list of backlinks you can now do a quality check on them. You can either evaluate each link individually or use a tool that analyses all your links for you. Here is how to start evaluating your backlinks. 

Are All Your Backlink Domains Unique?

The number of links on your page may not be the reason why your webpage isn’t ranking high. So make sure that all your links have unique domains.

Check the SEO Strength of Your Backlinks

One aspect that decreases your page ranking is if your links send visitors to spammy websites. There are online link analysis tools that check the authority of a site according to various SEO criteria.

Domains in Different Countries

If you’re trying to build a strong geo-location SEO strategy then you should have plenty of local links on your webpage. If you’re an Australian based company, consider linking to more Australian based domains as opposed to ones with an American or UK domain.

Check Keywords of Your Anchor Texts

Links that have irrelevant anchor texts can be detrimental to your page ranking. Identical anchor texts and keyword stuffing can also cause a decline in page ranking.

Do Your Links Have Penalties?

Make sure none of your links has penalties associated with them. There are algorithmic and manual penalties that you should be aware of. Both of these penalties can decrease your page’s ranking and as a result, your inbound traffic will also be reduced.

If you get a manual penalty, you’ll get a notification from Google Webmaster. On the other hand, you won’t receive notifications if you get an algorithmic penalty. You may have an algorithmic penalty if you’ve had a huge decrease in organic traffic to your site.

However, the large drop in organic traffic could also be natural. If you have a suspicion that you have an algorithmic penalty, check your site for bad links or paid links.

Start Fixing and Improving Your Backlinks

After checking your backlinks and determining all the problems they may be causing, it’s time to fix them up. In this next section, we’ll talk about how you can start improving on your backlinks.

How to Come Back From Penalties

During your audit, you may have noticed some low-quality links. These backlinks may be the reason why you’re experiencing more site penalties. The best way to recover from penalties, whether manual or algorithmic, is to remove bad links such as:

• Links with spammy domains
• Paid links
• Links from sites that have been penalised
• Broken links

Remove these links as soon as possible and replace them with authoritative or high-quality links that will add value to your webpage. When replacing your links, make sure you use relevant anchor texts too.

Ways to Improve Your Domain and Page Authority

Domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) are two metrics in the SEO industry that affect your page ranking.

Improving your domain and page authority is an ongoing endeavour that you should always prioritise. One way to improve your DA and PA is to get backlinks from authoritative sites that are relevant to your industry.

If you don’t continuously work on your DA and PA your scores will drop which will harm your page ranking and site traffic. Your backlink audit will show you where your low-quality links are so you can remove them and improve your DA and PA scores. 

Monitor your backlinks regularly to ensure you’re always working on improving the authority of your site.

Final Thoughts

Are you too busy or don’t have enough knowledge to conduct your own backlink audit? Then let Digital Insider help you so you can concentrate on other aspects of your business. We are a certified SEO company so we know how to find and fix broken links that may be affecting your page ranking and your DA scores.

Digital Insider provides the expertise you need to ensure your website doesn’t receive penalties. Give us a call today on 0459 845 633 to discuss your requirement. For more information about the other services we offer you can visit our website or email us at [email protected]