How to Do a Backlink Profile Analysis (Backlink Audit)

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What Is a Backlink Audit?

A backlink audit usually analyses the quality, quantity, and relevance of links pointing to your website. The audit provides essential insights that help improve your SEO and backlink strategy, build better links, and outrank competitors in search results.

  1. Benchmark Your Backlink Profile Against Competitors

Importance:

  • Comparing your backlink profile with the competitors makes you gain more valuable and better insights.
  • Understand how your backlinks and referring domains stack up.
  • Ensure you regularly keep an eye on your link acquisition rate and Authority Score with competitors.

Steps:

  1. Access Backlink Analytics Tool:
    • Enter your domain name and click “Analyze.”
    • In the “Overview” tab, enter competitors’ domains and click “Compare.”
  2. Key Metrics to Analyse:
    • Backlinks, Referring Domains, and Referring IPs:
      • Estimate the size of your backlink footprint.
      • Higher numbers indicate a stronger backlink profile.
    • Authority Score:
      • Measures the quality of your website on a scale from 1 to 100.
      • Higher scores signify better quality.
    • Link Attributes:
      • Identify linking patterns.
      • Focus on “follow” links that influence rankings.
    • Referring Domains:
      • Check if your referring domains are growing or stagnant.
      • Compare growth with competitors.

Outcomes:

  • Identifies the strengths to leverage and weaknesses to address.
  • If link growth is still or competitors have more backlinks, prioritize building new links.

2. Analyze Each Backlink

Dig deeper and do a thorough analysis of each link individually.

What is the importance of Evaluating Backlinks?

Not all Backlinks are equal; some do harm your site. A low-quality backlink usually triggers Google penalties.

It is essential to identify and manage these links for maintaining a healthy ranking.

Using Backlink Checker

Start a Project:

  • Configure the tool.
  • Upload a list of your backlinks.

Review the Report:

  • Access a detailed report on your backlinks.
  • Key Metrics to Analyse
  • And know when a backlink goes missing

Overview Tab:

  • Overall Toxicity Score: This indicates the presence of low-quality links.
  • Analysed Backlinks: High numbers may indicate a negative SEO attack.
  • Referring Domains: Multiple links from the same domain are losses in its impact. Highlight the unique and relevant domains.

Audit Tab:

URLs:  It ensures that links are from legitimate websites.

Anchor Text: Relevant text subjects to high-quality backlinks while unnatural text suggests low quality.

Authority Score (AS): Higher AS means better influence on rankings.

Toxicity Score (TS): Lower TS indicates higher link quality. Check reasons for high TS on specific links.

Steps for Detailed Analysis:

  1. Use the “Audit” tab for an in-depth look at each backlink.
  2. Focus on the legitimacy of URLs, relevance of anchor text, and scores for authority and toxicity.
  3. Manage and disavow harmful links for protecting your site’s ranking.
  4. This structured approach helps maintain a clean and effective backlink profile.

3.Disavow the Bad Links

When to Take Action

  • Disavow or remove bad links if:
    • There might be many low-quality links that violate Google’s guidelines.
    • You will receive a manual action penalty from Google.
    • The links built by you might deliberately go against Google’s guidelines, risking SEO penalties.

Checking for Penalties

  • Go to “Security & Manual Actions” > “Manual actions” in Google Search Console.
  • If there are no penalties, a green check mark will appear.

Methods to Handle Bad Links

  1. Remove Links
    • Reach out to linking websites and request link removal.
    • Use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool:
      1. Filter the links with Toxicity Score of 60 or more.
      2. Select links to your “Remove” list.
      3. Connect your email in the “Remove” tab.
      4. Send link removal requests directly through the tool.
      5. Track requests in Semrush and your mailbox.
  2. Disavow Links
    • If links don’t get removed, use Google’s Disavow tool.
    • In Semrush, add bad links to your “Disavow” list.
    • Export the list as a .txt file.
    • Upload the file to the Google Disavow tool.

Important Note

  • Be cautious when disavowing links; unnecessary disavowing can harm your rankings. For more details, refer to the guide on disavowing backlinks.
  1. Reclaim Your Lost Backlinks

Reasons for Lost Backlinks

  • Author removed your link
  • Linking page redirected
  • Link replaced with another
  • Linking page deleted

Steps to Reclaim Backlinks

Use a link-building tool to find lost backlinks.

Go to the “Prospects” tab and click on “Lost Backlinks.”

Review each link to understand why it disappeared (e.g., 404 error due to deleted page).

Reach out to the website owner to request reinstatement.

Sample Email:

Hey [Name],

I noticed your ____ page is broken. Did you delete it on purpose or accidentally?

A broken page isn’t good for user experience or SEO. Reinstating the page might help.

No pressure if you don’t want to. Just thought it might be helpful to let you know.

Thanks,

[Your Name]

  1. Find New Opportunities to Build Valuable Links
  • Analyse Content Attracting Links.
  • Go to the “Indexed Pages” tab in your backlink analytics tool.
  • Identify your most linked-to content (e.g., listicles, how-to guides).
  • Create more of the similar content types that attract additional backlinks.
  • Research Competitors’ Strategies.
  • Open a backlink analytics tool and enter a competitor’s domain.
  • Go to the “Referring Domains” tab to see sites linking to your competitor.
  • Recognise frequently linking domains or types of websites.

Example: If competitors get links from media outlets, consider digital PR strategies.

  1. Use similar strategies to earn links for your site.
  2. Build Higher-Quality Backlinks.
  3. You may use the link-building tool to find relevant websites.
  4. Set up your project and go to the “Prospects” tab.
  5. Review once each prospect and move promising ones to the “In Progress” tab. Click “Contact” to send outreach emails.
  6. Keep following the best practices and give strong reasons for linking to your site.

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