You might not think about your backlinks every day, but Google does. And if you’ve got the wrong ones pointing to your site, your rankings—and your entire online presence—could be at risk.
A link audit is the only way to know whether your backlinks are helping or hurting you. Because once Google flags you for shady or unnatural links, recovering can be next to impossible.
The problem? Most website owners don’t even realize they need a link audit—until it’s too late. Let’s walk through why auditing your backlinks is essential and how to clean up any link-related mess before it tanks your rankings.
Key Takeaways
- A link audit is a process of reviewing all the links associated with your website to ensure they are natural, quality, and not broken.
- You should perform regular link audits to keep your website authority and credibility high.
- Performing link audits is time-consuming but worth it.
What Is a Link Audit?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7yNV65B9gchPaeC5EdK1QGdrfGoi4AE/view?usp=sharing
A link audit is the process of reviewing all the links that point to and from your website to ensure they are high-quality or, at the very least, not in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. You should perform this audit regularly, and you can do it manually.
How did we get here?
The Penguin and Panda Context: A Brief History
In the early days of websites as businesses, Google had a few Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guidelines that helped your site rise to the top of the Search Engine Pages (SERPs). Google wanted to be able to provide helpful content to users searching for information, products, and services. In short, Google was a kind of middleman, and its success relied on its ability to make good connections.
Those early guidelines, in the early 2000s, ranked highly for “on-page activities” like keywords. As time went on, Google ranked highly for backlinks. Essentially, if other websites recognized your website as worthy of linking to, your website would rank highly.
Seems logical, right?
Sadly, as always seems to be the case, the bad guys ruined it for everyone else.
Scammers and web owners with low-quality content, or no content at all, would engage in “keyword stuffing,” literally sprinkling keywords heavily through an article that may not even be relevant to the topic. They would also create shady backlinks by inserting their URL everywhere they could on the web:
- Social media pages
- Comment sections on social media posts
- Comment sections on blogs
- Forums
- Literally, anywhere
The result was higher ranks for low-quality sites that weren’t actually providing helpful content.
Not cool.
Of course, Google got smarter, as AI tends to do, and the company introduced its Panda update in 2011, followed by its Penguin update in 2012.
These updates penalized websites that engaged in shady backlinking and other inappropriate on page activities, like keyword stuffing.
Shady backlinks came in the form of:
- Article marketing and link wheels: This practice involves writing an article that includes backlinks to your website and marketing that article to hundreds of websites, so they’ll post it, legitimizing your backlinks. The link wheel does this in a circular fashion, where multiple articles link to each other, and they all link back to your website.
- Paid links: Paying for backlinks is prohibited by Google. Backlinks must be organic to be considered a white-hat SEO strategy.
- Widgets: Widgets aren’t by their nature bad or shady, but when abused, those bits of embedded code can get you in trouble. Make sure any widgets on your site don’t include spam or links back to irrelevant content.
- Comment sections: As discussed above, the comment section of blogs, threads, and social media platforms has become the most common method for shady backlinks. Spammers will try to flatter the website and then drop a shady backlink into the comments.
Google’s updates have harshly penalized these shady backlinks, so we don’t see as much of it anymore. But still, the internet is a vast place, and scammers are gonna scam. It’s what they do.
Why Should I Perform a Link Audit?
Which is why you should perform a link audit. A link audit will:
- Give you clarity on what sources are linking to your website. You’ve heard it said that knowledge is power. This is an excellent example of where that is profoundly true. You want to know who is linking to your website, why, and what the content is in those sources. Another great expression: you are who you hang out with. Backlinks are the SEO version of that expression. The sites linking to yours affect your brand reputation.
- Protect your brand. And your brand reputation is everything. Users care almost exclusively about how you make them feel, what kind of experience they have, and what value you can add to their lives. If your brand is connected to porn sites, male enhancement pills, and shady Russian spam sites, your users will find out, and they may lose respect for your brand.
- Improve your SEO ranking. The better you get at auditing your links, the better your SEO ranking will be. You can remove bad links, clear up the cobwebs, and see what is working. Michelle Tansey, founder of Red Queen Marketing, says a link audit “helps to understand what websites are linking to the websites you work for without any prompting (this is called organic linking). It can help your content strategy because then you know what to create more of. Auditing the anchor text of the links helps me understand what other websites think my content and website are about. It's been proven via Google documents that they look at the anchor text to understand what your website is about.”
Understanding Your Link Profile
Ultimately, a link audit is all about protecting your link profile. Your link profile is the history of everything connected to your URL. It tracks all the links within your web pages and all those backlinks that point to your web pages.
Your link profile is, to date, one of the most powerful criteria used by Google Search, combined with your content quality and domain history.
Guard it with your life.
Link Audit Goals
Before we get into the how, let’s talk about your goals. You have a few metrics to hit by performing regular link audits. It’s important to understand your goals so you make sure to take the time and put in the effort to achieve those goals.
- Limit search engine penalties: Your site could be penalized if shady backlinks are discovered. Your goal is to avoid that.
- Prevent site de-indexing: One of the harshest penalties is that your URL is entirely de-indexed. You won’t rank at all. That’s the equivalent of internet death.
- Discover technical issues: Of course, some of your links will be of the highest quality, and you want to make sure those links aren’t broken or going to the wrong place. These problems could lead to lower SEO rankings by default.
- Identify and resolve any linking issues quickly: Ultimately, the goal of a link audit is to identify any issues that come up and make your site seem less than worthy of the highest praise and reputation. It’s worth the time.
How to Perform a Link Audit
Now, how do you perform a link audit? Here are the steps:
Step 1: Gather your link data from Google Search Console by clicking on “links to your site” under “search traffic. Then, select “who links the most” and download the latest links. Go to the “data” tab and “convert text to column.” This will provide you with a spreadsheet that you can use as your link audit spreadsheet.
Step 2: Check the anchor text, or the clickable text, for red flags, like:
- Exact keyword match
- Diversity of words that includes keywords
- Generic phrases, like “click here”
- Links that are unrelated to your page
- Links to porn
- Links to male enhancement pills
- Links to gambling sites
Step 3: Review the page content of the sites linking to your pages. Are they high-quality? Does the text make sense? Are they spamming? While word count isn’t a huge issue, it’s a pretty good indicator of a lower-quality site if the page only has a couple hundred words. Are there tons of ads? Does the website seem authoritative and credible? All of these factors can determine whether the backlink is shady or not.
Step 4: While the IP address isn’t directly related to whether the site is shady, it can be one of several determining factors. For example, if the site is housed in Russia or India, two countries known for producing a lot of spam content, that should count as a possible red flag.
What to Do with my Link Audit Results
Alright, you’ve done your link audit. Now what? You’ve got your nice spreadsheet, you know which backlinks are shady and which are all good. What do you do with those results?
You start pruning.
When you identify unnatural links, you want to get to them before Google gets to you.
Your first move should be to contact the site owners of shady backlinks and ask them to remove the links to your site. Keep a clear paper trail that shows your requests and their responses, if you get any.
Wait a couple of weeks, and if you get no response, file that link in a disavowal file to be sent to Google.
When you have a good file, head to Google Search Console and use the “disavow links tool.”
There, you can submit a report for each shady backlink that includes a message similar to this:
blankedyblank.com has not removed the following links:
http://blankedyblank.com/bad/website/shady-blog.html
http://blankedyblank.com/super/shady/paid-links.html
I contacted the blankedyblank.com owner on 8/17/2022
To request removal of links. Got no response.
Domain: blankedyblank.com
Google has made it really clear, thanks to the Penguin 4.0 update, that you should only disavow backlinks that could truly harm your site. Low-quality websites won’t necessarily harm your reputation, and may still provide some link juice. No reason to report them.
Link Auditing Offers Benefits. Reporter Outreach Can Help.
In the end, link auditing provides you with a keen look into your link profile, which is directly related to how your website is performing. Indeed, your backlinks are perhaps the single most important off page activity to consider in terms of SEO. By regularly auditing your website’s links, you can help establish credibility and authority, which will go a long way toward building a strong brand reputation.
Looking for high-quality, white hat backlinks? Reporter Outreach offers white label link building services to connect you to high-quality websites eager to work with reputable businesses like yours.
Don’t just sit on the sidelines and hope for the best. Get the backlinks you need so your brand can get the attention it deserves.
Book a meeting today, and we’ll show you how we can help.
FAQS
What is a link audit?
A link audit is the process of reviewing all the links to and from your website to see if they’re shady, unnatural, or broken.
Is it hard to do a link audit?
It’s not hard. But it is time-consuming. Still, it’s worth it.
What happens if I don’t do a link audit?
Not doing regular link audits exposes you to potentially shady characters and, in the end, could result in you being penalized and de-indexed by Google.
