All Your Backlink Auditing Solutions In A Simple 8-Steps Guide

Wondering why your continuous efforts for effective SEO are not paying off? Well, perhaps you are not prepared enough. We all know the importance of SEO and getting it right is necessary for a website to flourish. Hence, there should be nothing or no one between your website and SEO success.

To make your SEO efforts standout in the clutter of daily online content, doubling down on research and analysis is considered a must. Research and analysis are the foundation of SEO; if these are not strong, your SEO efforts will crumble soon. Hence, it is considered essential to run an audit, gain comprehensive knowledge of the SEO strengths and weaknesses in your current strategy, and work on areas of development.

One such aspect is link building. Experts recommend running a holistic backlink audit to develop a good understanding of your backlink profile before launching a full-fledged campaign and seeing all your efforts and resources squandered. However, no need to be overwhelmed by all the technicalities of backlink audits. Stick with us here and be informed on the nitty gritties of backlink auditing.

What Is A Backlink?

Before proceeding to understand the detailed process of a backlink audit, it is essential that all of us are on the same page regarding the basic understanding of Backlinks (also known as “inbound links” or “one-way links”). These are links to webpages from one website embedded in another website. Many search engines, including Google, consider backlinks “votes” for each webpage. In this essence, webpages with more excellent backlinks are generally ranked higher on search engine results.

Importance of Backlinks in SEO

Now that we have understood the concept of backlinks, we can move further on understanding the backlink audit process. Since we know that search engines, notably Google, utilize backlinks for measuring the credibility and authority of a webpage, the higher the amount of high-quality backlinks a website possesses, the more its likeliness to be ranked well on the search engine results. Nevertheless, a crucial idea to understand is that not all backlinks are equal; backlinks from renowned and dominant websites weigh more when compared to those from spamming or low-standard websites.

But What Exactly Is A Backlink Audit?

Simply put, a backlink audit can be referred to as reviewing all the links leading toward a website. A general outline goes like this:

·         Locate the backlinks.

·         Analyze and identify the quality and bad ones.

·         Develop a backlink strategy for improvement. 

Although Google’s services can be used to download and view all the backlinks associated with your website; yet, if your business is considerably large with various referring domains, contacting a third-party backlinks auditing service can certainly help and make things more clear. In the latter case, time is more valuable than money since reviewing these backlinks can be equally resource-consuming and even more hectic for your team.

8 Steps For Effective Backlink Auditing

Let’s first recap and get our information together. A backlink audit can be vital in assessing the relevance and quality of links associated with a website. This way, individuals or businesses can identify and remove potentially harmful links that adversely impact your website’s search engine rankings. In addition, backlink auditing can also assist in identifying opportunities for other link-building and improvement in a website’s backlink profile. So here they are, the long-awaited eight steps for SEO backlink auditing:

·         Start with gathering a list of backlinks related to your website:

To do this, one can utilize tools like; Majestic, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to generate a holistic list of all the links related to a website. This way, one can identify the links’ source, status, and the anchor text utilized (i.e., whether it’s should-follow or no-follow).

·         Quality Analysis of The Links:

You should then evaluate the quality of each link based on many aspects, including the link-host website’s page and domain authority and the link host’s relevance to the original website’s field and content. In this essence, the greater the domain and page authority, the more valued a link would be. Furthermore, check the relevance of the link-host website to the original website’s niche, as the impact would be more significant if the link content, industry, and actual website were relevant.

·         Identify the low-quality and spam links:

Then comes the identification of any links attained via manipulative methods, which may include partaking in link farms or buying links. Such links are generally low-standard and, therefore, can be a bad signal for search engines. These links, in turn, adversely impact the website’s search engine rankings.

·         Identification of broken redirects or links:

Checking for any links which are no longer redirecting or leading to a new page. Leaving them in this state can be detrimental to your website.

·         Identify any links hosted by harmful or suspicious websites:

This process includes indicating the links hosted by any suspicious or dangerous websites. Such websites can consist of those which participate in phishing schemes or host malware.

·         Identify links from websites penalized by search engines:

If websites that are penalized by search engines host your link on their web pages, these backlinks can adversely impact the search engine rankings of the original website.

·         Work on dealing with harmful or low-quality links:

We have identified links that are bad or harmful to your site. This step is focused on taking on any of these links. However, these actions can vary per each different situation. These can include; requesting for removal of links from their websites or utilizing the “disavow” tool within Google Search Console to signal the search engines that you don’t want these links to be counted for assessment of search engine rankings.

Repeat The Cycle

All said and done however, it is essential to understand that this process is continuous, and the backlinks should be regularly monitored for the best results. The primary purpose of the drill is to make sure that the backlinks are relevant and high-quality to make sure that they complement search engine rankings rather than deteriorating them. Nevertheless, by following these simple eight steps or taking help from a firm that masters these steps, you can deal with all your backlinks issues comprehensively.