7 Steps to a Comprehensive Backlink Audit

How-to: Find backlinks with SEO SpyGlass. Run SEO SpyGlass backlink audit tool, enter your website's URL, and let the software collect all your backlinks.

Tips: 1. Pull backlinks from Google Search Console and Google Analytics. By default, SEO PowerSuite Link Explorer is used to collect backlinks — it's our inhouse link index that's updated non-stop, in real time. For an even more comprehensive backlink picture, you may want to use all 3 backlink sources integrated into SEO SpyGlass. To do this, go to Preferences > Google Analytics Account and enter your account credentials. To pull backlink data from Search Console, go to Preferences > Google Search Console Account.

2. Check if all the links are still in place. It's not always possible for link indexes to keep up with all the changes on the Web, and some backlinks that no longer exist in reality may still be kept in SEO PowerSuite Link Explorer, Google Analytics, or Google Search Console. Thus, when you analyze your site's backlinks, you may have some non-existent backlinks messing up your stats.

That's where SEO SpyGlass' real-time link checks come in handy. To check your backlinks in real time, go to Backlink Profile > Backlinks, select the backlinks in your workspace, and hit to update backlink page data. Check only the Backlink Page Info box and hang on a little while your link data is being refreshed. When the backlink audit is complete, examine the Links Back column: it will show whether each link is indeed found on the page with either dofollow tag or nofollow tag attribute. If the link or the linking page has been removed, you will see the link missing or page not found value.

Once you've found such non-existent links, you can safely remove them from the project completely (right-click the link and hit Remove backlinks from project) to make sure you aren't wasting your time on analyzing links that no longer exist.

How-to: 1. Compare your Total Links vs. Linking Domains. The total number of backlinks your site has is a good starting point in understanding how strong your backlink profile is. Yet multiple links coming from one and the same domain are considered to have lower value, so unique linking domains are typically a more reliable metric than link count.

Your link profile will obviously have considerably more total links than linking domains, but your aim is to have as even a ratio as possible.

2. Check the dofollow vs nofollow ratio. While it's true that nofollow links do not have SEO weight, a natural link profile can't consist of dofollow links only, so your best option is to have a natural mix of nofollow and dofollow links.

If nofollow links prevail in your backlink profile, it's a signal to rethink your link-building strategy and try to focus on acquiring more SEO-valuable dofollow links.

If there aren't any nofollow links in your profile, this may be a flag that your links were acquired in an unnatural manner and you need to further investigate your profile for other traces of spammy techniques.

3. Assess your link profile growth over time. Go through the Live Backlinks History to get an overview of how your backlink profile changed over time. Review the backlink history to see if your site's number of backlinks has been growing. Look for spikes to figure out which of your marketing activities (content, campaigns, etc.) have been especially successful in attracting links.

4. See the SEO strength of your backlink profile. The audit tool compiles a brief overview report into the PageRank and the authority of the referring domains. InLink Rank is a metric to estimate the authority of the page or of the domain according to a number of search engine ranking criteria. This metric is crucial to consider in your link building strategy to secure your site against link penalties.

5. Analyze how many backlinks are coming from homepages. As the homepage is the most authoritative page of a website, links appearing there can be easily deemed as paid links — especially if their number is excessive.

If links from homepages considerably exceed links from internal pages in your link profile, pay extra attention to these links and make sure they were built naturally.

6. Check backlink countries. When it comes to backlink countries, just like with other aspects of link profile audit, you should keep in mind your links' diversity. Yet the rule of a thumb is that if you optimize your website for a specific geo-location, your aim is to get maximum location-relevant backlinks.

Say, if you're a UK-based business that targets a local market, but most of your links are coming from USA-based websites, it's high time for you to switch to getting good backlinks from local sites.

7. Check top anchor texts and keywords. Irrelevant anchor text, keyword stuffing, or too many identical anchors can get you in trouble with search engines and cause a ranking drop.

If your obvious anchor text leaders are commercial anchors with lots of money keywords, it's high time to start an anchor-text diversification campaign.

Further down, you will see the Anchor texts cloud which is a visual presentation of your anchor text density. The top anchors (often this is a branded anchor of a company), are highlighted in larger fonts and different colors.

8. Examine the linked-to pages. Most links your site receives will typically point to your homepage — the first level in the structure of your website. However, you need to balance those links by a number of other links going to deep internal pages of the website.

If you have very few links pointing to your internal pages, it may be a good idea to launch a thought-out content marketing campaign that earns more backlinks for your deeper pages.

How-to: Add competitors' sites for comparison. In your SEO SpyGlass project, navigate to the Domain Comparison module and specify the URLs of your top SEO competitors. Voila! The tool analyzes backlinks of your top ranking rivals, comparing them against a bunch of crucial link factors, with a 1 to 5 overall rating assigned to each site.

Tips: 1. See where your competitors' links intersect. Looking into the intersection in your competitors' backlink profiles can give you insight into their link strategy — and help spot some valuable link building opportunities for your own site.

To do this, go to the Link Intersection submodule (still under the Domain Comparison module) to see the domains that link to two or more of your competitors but not to you. Such referring domains are your best candidates in terms of link acquisition, as they are relevant to your niche, and pitching a backlink from them will be quite natural.

2. Explore competitors' links in-depth. When you were adding competitors to the competitive backlink analysis, SEO SpyGlass created a project for each of them in the background. In the Projects drop-down menu, select a competitor you'd like to look at in detail, and hang on a moment while SEO SpyGlass loads all the data. Switch to the Summary module for an overview of the competitor's link profile. The anchor-related part can be especially useful for ideas on new anchors for your links. Anchor diversity (unique anchors divided by backlink count) is also an important metric to consider — it'll give you a solid idea on how many of your anchors you need to optimize for your target keywords.

How-to: Calculate Penalty Risk. In SEO SpyGlass' Backlink Profile module, switch to the Penalty Risk submodule — here, you'll be able to review and analyze the domains that link to your site. Select all referring domains and hit the Update button to refresh on the Penalty Risk stats.

Hang on a moment while SEO SpyGlass is checking the domains. When it's done, click on the header of the Penalty Risk column to sort the domains by their riskiness.

Roughly, a link with a 0 to 30% risk value is usually considered safe. A link in the 30 to 70% range may potentially be harmful, so it's recommended that you take a closer look at it. A Penalty Risk of over 70% is considered high and calls for immediate action to prevent link penalties.

For details on why any one of the domains is considered risky, click the info button next to the domain's Penalty Risk value. This will reveal a list of factors that make links from this domain potentially risky.

How-to: Examine the risky linking domains. Still in Backlink Profile -> Linking Domains submodule, in the Linking domains tab, go through the available columns to double-check all the suspicious links you've found. Select the domains and click the update button to check if the domain is relevant to your topic, and if the website itself is trustworthy.

Tips: 1. Check how much traffic each backlink brings. Although not an SEO factor, stats on traffic through backlinks let you see which of your links bring actual visits to your site.

The data on referral traffic is driven from Google Analytics. So, you need to specify your Google Analytics credentials, if you haven't done it at the beginning, and the audit tool will sync with your GA account and gather the traffic stats. You can add the Referral Sessions column by clicking on the Edit visible columns button in the upper right corner of the workspace and quickly see if the backlink pages and referring domains bring you page views. (Alternatively, in your Backlink Profile, switch to the Referral Traffic submodule that will give you a breakdown by referring domains and by backlink pages).

Now, you can see how many visitors each of your backlinks has brought in the last 30 days in the Referral sessions (GA) column.

2. Check InLink Rank. This metric, being an alternative to Google's PageRank, shows the value of your backlinks. The higher InLink Rank score means that these links (or domains if you check Domain InLink Rank) are the most valuable in your profile. And a low score helps you to identify low quality, spammy links. If you see that there are such links in your profile, you should consider removing them to stay safe from link penalties.

3. Use tags. You may want to tag some of your backlinks at this stage, so that you can quickly sort out all the links that require further action (e.g. if you plan to contact the webmaster to ask for link removal). To tag a backlink, right-click it and choose Add tags to selected record(s).

Then, use the filter tag to sieve away the bad links from the rest of non-spammy links.

How-to: 1. Get webmasters' contact details. To save time on digging up contact info manually, you can get webmasters' email addresses right in SEO SpyGlass. To do that, in your SEO SpyGlass workspace, right-click the header of any column to open the workspace editor. Add a Contact Info column to your workspace (by double-clicking it in the list of available columns on the left), and click OK. Now, select the links you'd like to get contact details for, hit the Update button, and select Contact Info to be updated. The column you've just added will now populate with email addresses of webmasters (if available on the website).

2. Reach out to webmasters via email. Copy the email addresses SEO SpyGlass found for you, and send out emails to webmasters. If you only found a couple of spammy links, you can easily do that by composing a personal email for each of the webmasters — but if we're talking about dozens or hundreds of harmful backlinks, you may want to create an email template requesting link removal. In either case, make sure you introduce yourself in your email, mention your position (e.g. SEO or site owner), explain that you are trying to prevent (or recover from) a search engine penalty and would appreciate it if the link was removed, specifying the URL of the page you found the link on.

How-to: 1. Add links to the disavow list. In your SEO SpyGlass project, select the backlinks you'd like to disavow. Right-click the selection, and hit Disavow backlinks.

2. Decide if you're disavowing the spammy backlink only or the whole referring domain, and add comments. In the menu that pops up, choose whether you'll only be disavowing the backlink page you just added (Backlink), or the whole domain that links to your site (Entire Domain). At this step, you can also add a comment to the records you're disavowing. Comments are useful for your own future reference - whenever you review or edit your disavow file later, you'll instantly see what kind of referring domains you were disavowing and why.

3. Export your disavow file. After you've added all links you're about to disavow to the list, go to Preferences -> Disavow/Blacklist Backlinks. At this stage, you can edit the comments by double-clicking any comment to make changes. Clicking Add lets you add links to your disavow links, and clicking Remove deletes selected records from the list. In the Choose the action menu, you can select whether you'd like to simply disavow the backlinks, disavow and exclude them from all future updates you make in the project, or disavow and blacklist the links (have them removed from the project completely).

Once you're happy with your disavow list, hit the Export button and select the folder to save the file in so that you can upload it to Google Webmaster Tools.

4. Upload your disavow file to Google. In the Google Disavow Tool, select your website and upload the disavow file you generated. That's it — you've told Google which of your backlinks to ignore, and your site is all set to start clean!

Tip: Mind that every new disavow file you upload to Google will override the previous one. If you've already submitted a disavow file for your site, make sure your new file includes the previously disavowed links in addition to the ones you're disavowing for the first time.