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Link building. How to know if you’re doing it right?

6 minutes of reading
Link building. How to know if you’re doing it right?
Category SEO

Link building can seem like an arduous process that requires tons of time and effort. However, if you build your links properly, you’ll reap the rewards in terms of increased traffic, conversions, and more customers. But how do you know if you’re on the right track? Follow this link building audit checklist to find out.

Contents:

Introduction: audit

In the general sense of the word, an audit is an independent assessment of a given organization, company, project, product. In the case of SEO, the subject of speech is the website, both from the technical as well as marketing and promotion side. Its purpose is to assess its current condition, advantages and disadvantages. Although it does not solve problems, it can name them and determine the steps needed to implement to improve the operation of the website. Therefore, it is a key step before any optimization, evaluation, positioning.

Link building audit

A link building audit is a review of your website’s link profile. This includes an analysis of your backlinks, as well as your site’s linking structure. The goal of a link building audit is to identify any problems with your link profile that could be holding back your site’s performance. Does your site have too many broken links? If you don’t know how to answer these questions, you might want to find out before the problem becomes much worse.

How to start?

The first step is to make a list of all the websites that link to your site. Once you have that list, you can start checking the quality of those links. To do that, you’ll want to look at things like the PageRank of the linking site, the relevancy of the link, and whether or not the link is a follow or nofollow link. By doing this audit, you can get an idea of which links are helping your site and which ones are hurting it.

If you see some bad links on your list, now’s the time to take action. There are many ways to remove bad backlinks from Google’s index – some good and some bad. It’s important that you use a service that follows Google’s guidelines so as not to damage your website in any way. After removing the bad backlinks, submit a reconsideration request through Google Webmaster Tools.

Next, keep an eye out for suspicious activity on your backlink profile over the next few months. If you notice an increase in spammy links, contact the webmaster who owns that website and let them know about their mistake. In most cases they will be more than happy to help you by taking down the offending link. Repeat this process with every spammy site you find.

Remember to maintain focus and only concentrate on one type of spam at a time. Do not go crazy and try to fix everything at once! Just focus on what needs to be done today. Asking for help from a company that specializes in search engine optimization will also help to ensure the safety of your site.

How often should you do an audit?

A backlink audit should be done at least once a quarter, but more frequently if you notice your site’s link profile changing rapidly. Checking your backlinks regularly can help you catch problems early and prevent them from doing too much damage.

Types of links to check in your backlink audit

In order to make sure your link building efforts are effective, you need to perform a backlink audit on a regular basis. Here are some of the types of links you should check:

  • Inbound links – these are links from other websites to your website.
  • Outbound links – these are links from your website to other websites. Make sure that you’re not linking to any low-quality or spammy websites.
  • Broken Links – check for broken links by checking your internal and external links for 404 errors or by using tools like Screaming Frog or Xenu Link Sleuth. If you find broken links, fix them as soon as possible.

What are the red flags in my backlink profile?

  • Low number of linking root domains;
  • A large percentage of nofollow links;
  • Links that have been devalued by Penguin updates;
  • High percentage of broken (404) and/or missing (410) page errors;
  • Uncommon anchor text diversity;
  • Quantity of links. If you have too many or too few links, this could be an indication that something is off.

What can you do about not wanted links?

A link building audit can help you determine whether or not your link building efforts are paying off. If you find that you have a lot of bad links, there are a few things you can do to clean them up. First, reach out to the webmaster and ask them to remove the link. If they don’t respond or if the link is still there after a few weeks, you can use the Google Disavow Tool. This tool tells Google not to take certain links into account when determining your PageRank. It can be used as a last resort because it will also tell Google not to take any new links from those sites into account either. Be careful with this one!

Useful tools

If you want to do a link building audit, there are a few tools that can be helpful. First, Moz’s Open Site Explorer can show you the links pointing to your site. Second, Google Search Console can help you track your link building progress over time. Third, Ahrefs can give you insights into your competitor’s link building strategies. Fourth, Majestic SEO can help you understand the quality of the links pointing to your site.

In a nutshell

First, you will need to look at the number and quality of your inbound links (which should include branded and non-branded keywords). Second, you’ll want to review the content on your own site for instances where you may have published spammy or low-quality content. Lastly, you’ll want to check the HTML code on each page of your site to see if there are any broken links. If there are broken links, this means those pages won’t rank well because they aren’t getting enough traffic from other sites. A link building audit not only lets you know about potential problems but also provides solutions for correcting them.

As you can see the link building audit is a process where you analyze your website’s link profile and compare it against a set of best practices. By doing this, you can identify any areas where your link building efforts may be falling short, and take steps to improve your strategy.

Aleksandra Pietrzak
Copywriter
Curator at the National Museum in Poznań, graduate of Art History at the Jagiellonian University and Contemporary Art at the Pedagogical University of Krakow, curator of exhibitions and author of scientific and popular texts. A lover of contemporary art, literature and travel.
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