How To Do A Backlink Audit: A Complete 2023 Guide

What Is a Backlink Audit?

A backlink audit is a thorough analysis of the links pointing to your site.

These are links on other websites—also called referring domains—that direct users to your own website.

By reviewing your backlinks, you’ll be able to identify harmful or toxic links and find opportunities for future link building.

Performing a backlink audit is also an essential step whenever you take over any new site.

It shows you exactly what you are working with and lets you fix errors like bad backlinks before implementing other strategies.

You can also use a basic backlink audit to benchmark your website’s metrics before conducting a link building campaign.

When you know your starting point, you can determine if the strategies you’re implementing generate links the way you want them to.

You should also consider performing a backlink audit if you have an existing site you haven’t yet audited.

You may find opportunities to improve that you didn’t know existed, such as posts that have attracted many high-quality links and organic search traffic.

Why Perform a Backlink Audit?

A complete link audit lets you see the bigger picture and shows you how your backlink profile compares to the competition’s.

There are a couple of reasons why even a basic backlink audit can benefit your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and attract organic traffic to your website.

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 link data you obtain to measure the impact of your link building activities and gauge your success so far.

2) Discover Bad Links

Bad backlinks—also known as toxic backlinks—affect how your website ranks on search engines like Google.

For example, too many external links from link schemes or private blog networks (PBNs)—whether you generated them intentionally or not—can result in link penalties.

While Google’s algorithm can increasingly ignore such links, some do get through.

If you suspect that links are affecting your rankings, it’s often best to remove them.

A backlink audit will highlight any problematic or low-quality links.

You can then use this information to assess whether the links negatively affect your website. If they do, you can take steps to remove them.

3) Find opportunities

A backlink audit is also essential for finding new opportunities.

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.

4) Suss out the competition

A link audit can help you gain a greater understanding of how your competitors’ sites are performing.

As you know, you always want to stay one step ahead of your competitors wherever possible.

A thorough link audit can provide insight into what your competitors are up to, and it can give you new ideas on how to outperform them.

For example, if you find that a piece of content on your competitor's website performs particularly well with receiving backlinks, you can create similar content and seek out those links.

➡️ Your website’s authority

Most SEO tools provide a domain authority (DA) score based on the quantity and quality of the links that point to your site.

Use these metrics to get a quick overview of your site’s backlinks.

We use Ahrefs’ DR, but there are many tools available to check your domain authority score.

➡️ Your link acquisition rate

This will show you how fast your site has been acquiring links.

When you start a link building campaign, you’ll want to acquire links at a faster rate than this.

Noting all these metrics will provide a clear overview of your website’s current backlink profile.

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 have a new website, whether that’s because you’ve 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 websites 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 opinions on a particular topic. If a website has a lot of links from this type of article, it may indicate that they’re using a service like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) to generate backlinks.

➡️ Niche Edits: Niche edits are paid links. Paid links occur when one website pays another 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 add much to the article. If you see a lot of these links, it could be a sign that the website has used this link building strategy before.

4) Identify and Disavow 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 links that could harm your website.

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.

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 tough to rank with this in place.

The manual action message will provide more information about your next steps, but it will likely mean you need to disavow links.

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

You would need to upload a spreadsheet with all the domains you want to disavow in Google Search Console.

👉 Read our detailed guide on how to disavow links.

Step Two: Check for spammy and toxic backlinks

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

A spammy backlink includes those acquired from link farms, link schemes, PNBs, and irrelevant blog comments.

Step Three: Check your spam score

One of the easiest ways to do this is to use the Moz Spam Score. It shows the percentage of incoming links 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.

Step four: Check your ccTLD distribution

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

Links from websites with ccTLDs unrelated to your website are often suspicious.

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 web pages will generate some links from countries that aren’t relevant to their site. And not all of these links are necessarily spammy backlinks.

But if the percentage of links from these countries is disproportionately high, you should investigate.

Step five: Review Anchor Text

Anchor text is words on your site that contain hyperlinks. They are the clickable parts of the text that redirect visitors to other pages.

People will often 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 the running magazine, Runner’s World.

The most-used text 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 have put together a guide that 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 backlinks

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

➡️ The first is to simply leave it as is. All websites attract spammy 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 many 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 must 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 referral traffic it receives.

If you notice a page has many links but not much traffic, it could be time for a content refresh.

The key to improving your rankings is to identify why the page doesn’t have search 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.

Before updating a page, check the pages that rank for the target keyword.

If they have more backlinks and authority than your page, you may still find it hard to rank even after an update.

7) Check out Your Competitors

Once you’ve completed all the above steps, you should have a decent overview of your website’s backlink profile.

Another 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 where you can improve and gain data for your next link building strategy.

👉 We have further information about how to check your competitor backlinks in a guide.

8) Check for a negative SEO attack

Negative SEO attacks—also known as black hat SEO—is when someone uses malicious methods to tarnish your website and ruin the trust you’ve built with Google.

Usually, the intent behind a negative SEO attack is to steal search rankings for competing keywords.

Some attackers will even assume your identity and contact websites that have linked to your web pages and ask for these links to be removed—which is the last thing you want.

Conducting regular audits of your backlink profile will help you identify negative SEO attacks before they affect your rankings and undo all your hard work.

Wrapping up on Backlink Audits

Not only is a backlink audit an excellent way to find areas that you can improve on, but it’s also your best option when it comes to picking up potential issues.

Once you’ve completed your audit, you’ll know what you can fix to bolster your search engine rankings—like dead backlinks—and you’ll know what to include in your backlink-building strategy.

If you want a clear path forward for your link building efforts, an audit is the best place to start.

We’re experts in carrying out thorough and comprehensive backlink audits for our clients as we know just how beneficial it can be. If you’d like to learn more about backlink audits and how we can help, get in touch with us via our website.