Backlink Audit - How to Analyze Your Link Profile

What Is a Backlink Audit?

A backlink audit is a thorough analysis of the links that point to your site. By reviewing your backlinks, you’ll identify harmful links and find opportunities for future link building.

Performing a backlink audit is an essential step whenever you take over a new site. It shows exactly what you are working with and lets you fix any errors before implementing other strategies.

You can also use a backlink audit to benchmark your website’s metrics before conducting a link building campaign. When you know your start point, you can tell if the strategies you implement are generating links.

You should also consider performing a backlink audit if you have an existing site that you haven’t yet audited. You may find opportunities that you didn’t even know existed, such as posts that have organically attracted a lot of links.

Why Perform a Backlink Audit?

There are three main reasons to perform a backlink audit:

1) Benchmark Your Site

A backlink audit provides essential information about your website’s backlink profile. You can use this to benchmark your website.

Use the data to measure the impact of your link building efforts. Or you can use it to compare your website to those of your competitors.

2) Discover Bad Links

Bad links affect how your website ranks on Google. Too many external links from link farms or PBNs—whether or not you generated them intentionally—can result in penalties.

While Google’s algorithm is increasingly able to ignore such links, some do get through. If you suspect that links are affecting your rankings, it can be best to remove them.

A backlink audit will highlight problematic links. You can then use this information to assess whether you think the links are negatively affecting your website. If they are, you can take steps to remove the links.

3) Find Opportunities

A backlink audit is also essential for finding backlink opportunities. And the results of your audit should influence your future campaigns.

For example, you can see the type of content on your website that generates the most links. Creating more content like this can result in even more links.

3) Look for Link Types

There are many ways to generate backlinks. Knowing the types of links your site already has can inform your future campaigns.

This is a good step to take if you are new to a website, whether that’s because you have just bought it, or because you are taking over SEO from a previous company.

Head to the “Backlinks” section in the “Backlink Profile” menu of Ahrefs to see all your links. You can also order the links by DR to see those from authoritative sites first. Or filter the list so you only see dofollow links.

Common types of links to look out for include:

• Guest Posts - Guest post backlinks are when you write articles on other websites that link back to your own. They are a great way to generate high-quality links and also allow you to link to specific pages on your website.
• Roundups - Roundup articles are those where multiple experts provide their opinion on a particular topic. If a website has a lot of links from this type of article, it could suggest it is using a service like HARO to generate backlinks.
• Niche Edits - Niche edits are paid backlinks. It’s when one website pays another website to link directly to them. A clear sign of paid backlinks is when a website has a lot of links with keyword match anchor text. Or if they have links that don’t appear to be adding much to the article. If you see a lot of this type of link, it could be a sign that the website has used this link building strategy before.

4) Identify and Disavow Harmful Links

This is a very important 'defensive' play.

So far we’ve focused on discovering SEO opportunities. But you should also use a backlink audit to identify potentially harmful links. You can then take steps to remove these links.

Here’s how to do it...

Step One: Check for Manual Actions

If you’re taking over a new site, the first place to look is Google Search Console to find out if you have any manual actions.

Just click on the “Security and Manual Actions” tab in the sidebar. Hopefully, you’ll see a “No issues detected” message like in the image below.

But if you see a manual action, taking care of this should be your priority as it will be very hard to rank with this in place.

The manual action message will provide more information about your next steps, but it will likely involve removing or disavowing bad links.

You can then submit a reconsideration request to tell Google that you have fixed the issue.

To do this, you just need to upload a spreadsheet with all the domains you want to disavow in Google Search Console.

👉 We have a detailed guide on exactly how to disavow links.

Step Two: Check for Spammy Backlinks

Even if you don’t have a manual action, it’s still a good idea to check your website for spammy backlinks.

Check Your Moz Spam Score

One of the easiest ways to do this is to use the Moz Spam Score. It shows the percentage of links coming from sites with similar features to those penalized by Google.

You’ll see a breakdown like the one in the image below. The lower your Spam Score, the better.

Moz also shows a list of your links organized from highest to lowest spam score. This is an easy way to identify potential culprits to remove.

Check Your CTLD Distribution

Country Code Top-Level Domains (CTLD) are the domain endings that suggest a website is from a particular country. For example, .co.uk for the UK, or .in for India.

Links from websites with CTLDs unrelated to your website are often suspect. If all your content is in English but you have a lot of links from China, these links may be spam.

You can see this information in the Ahrefs “Backlink Overview” report.

Most websites will generate some links from countries that aren’t relevant to their site. And not all of these links are spammy.

But if the percentage of links from these countries is disproportionately high, you should look into why this is the case.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the words that people attach the link on your site to. Most often, people will use branded anchor text or anchor text related to your articles.

You can see examples of this in the image below—it shows the anchor text for running magazine Runner’s World. The most-used text either relates directly to the brand, or to running-related topics.

You may have a problem if a lot of your links have anchor text that is unrelated to your website content. We put together a guide which discusses optimal anchor text optimization.

Be especially aware of anchor text relating to topics like casinos, loans, or pharmaceuticals.

What to Do If You Find Bad Links

If you find harmful links, you have two basic options.

The first is to simply leave them. All websites attract spam links and Google is typically quite good at ignoring them. If your website has a relatively small percentage of bad links and you’re generating traffic from Google, you probably don’t need to do anything further.

But if you have a lot of bad links and are worried that they may cause a manual penalty from Google, you can disavow the links.

5) Look for Content Refresh Opportunities

A backlink audit can highlight opportunities to increase your traffic by refreshing stale content. The idea is to identify pages on your website with a high number of links but not much search traffic.

You can then refresh the page and optimize it for a specific keyword to give it a better chance of ranking.

First, you need to head back to the top pages by links report in Ahrefs.

You can then click on the drop-down menu of each page to see an estimate of how much organic traffic it receives.

If you notice a page has a high number of links but not much traffic, it could be due for a refresh.

The key to improving your rankings is to identify why the page doesn’t have traffic despite its links.

There are several reasons why this may be the case:

• The page is old and needs an update

• The page isn’t well optimized for SEO

• The page doesn’t meet what search engines consider to be the searcher intent for the keyword

Optional Step: Check Your Competitors

Once you’ve completed all the above steps you should have a very good idea about your website’s backlink profile.

A final optional backlink audit step is to perform the same checks on your competitors’ websites. This will help you compare your site’s backlink profile to the profiles of sites you compete with.

You can use this information to see places where you can improve and gain inspiration for your next link building strategy.

We have further information about how to check your competitor backlinks here.