Your Guide to Conducting SEO Link Audits

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

In the search engine optimization world there are certain unavoidable tasks to complete: Technical audits, site migrations, keyword research and link audits. That last one, the link audit, is an essential undertaking in our post-Penguin, negative SEO world. You need to keep on top of your site’s inbound links in order to maintain a profile of natural, high-quality links. A link profile full of links from low-quality sites with spammy anchor text and unnatural link velocity will actually harm your SEO and could result in a manual penalty, causing your web pages to disappear from the search results.

Links & Penguin: A Bit of Context

Why all this effort over links? It’s because they are important. Search engines see links as votes, or recommendations, for your site, and they pass value from the linking site to the target site. The value passed through these links goes by many names, including "PageRank" and “link juice”, and it’s one of the most important off page ranking factors in determining a site’s position in search results. As a result, SEOs spend a lot of time on link building to improve their backlink profile.

Not all links are equal in the eyes of Google: A link from a large, well-respected website is much more valuable than multiple links from smaller, less well-known sites. However, those less valuable links can add up very quickly. In the past, many SEOs saw link building as getting as many links as possible from any source they could find. Many well-known brands were in this line of thought, so many competitors were following suit in order to have a chance of competing. Some of the most popular blackhat techniques people used to build links were:

• Article marketing: Article marketing is writing an article with links pointing to a website and distributing it to hundreds of article websites that exist for the sole purpose of providing backlinks. Google’s Panda update was designed to downgrade these types of websites, which caused a lot of sites involved in article marketing to lose significant traffic.
• Buying/exchanging links: Paid and/or reciprocal links are both old favorite link building techniques. While search engines can’t technically know for sure that a link was bought, or placed in exchange for a reciprocal link, there are telltale signs like ‘sponsorship’ forms and pages dedicated solely to housing reciprocal links. Google even has a submission form you can use to report paid links. Note that you can still place paid links as long as they’re nofollow, otherwise you risk violating Google’s quality guidelines.
• Widgets: Bits of embeddable code on your website can be very useful for your users. However, they can include links that pass link juice. But, they can also be used and abused to pass link juice. In the worst cases they include spam links using irrelevant or exact-match anchor text. Google recently reiterated its position that widgets constitute unnatural links, threatening manual penalties for sites that engaged in unnatural link building. If you create a widget, give yourself credit with a link to your website, but use the rel="nofollow” attribute.
• Blog/forum comments: Blog and forum commenting is one of the most common methods, or at least most visible, of blackhat link building. Spammers write comments with over-optimized links in the signature section and/or the comment itself and then post them to every blog and forum comments section they can find, often automatically. Many of these comments use flattery as a way of slipping by moderators.
• Link wheels: Link wheels are a series of blogs/websites with thin, duplicate or otherwise low quality content that connect each other with a series of links: Site A links to site B, which links to site C and so on. Each site in the wheel then links to the main site. Google is pretty good at detecting link wheels so using one may give you a slight bump early on, but will likely result in being discounted at best, and get your site deindexed at worst.

These blackhat link schemes manipulated search engines in a way that pushed less useful websites higher in search engine result pages, hurting user experience. To combat this, Google created the Penguin update in April, 2012 (along with the Panda update in 2011, which was designed to downgrade pages with low quality, thin and/or duplicate content). While Penguin does look at a variety of on page issues, its primary focus is detecting unnatural backlinks. A large backlink profile with a bunch of low-quality links is now actually a liability, whereas a profile with fewer links from well-known and respected sites is much more valuable. It’s all about quality over quantity.

What is a Link Audit and Why Do I Need One?

If your site has been around for a while, or you’ve hired in-house or agency help for your SEO, there’s a chance your site has some low quality links you’re not even aware of. So how do you find out if you’ve got quality backlinks? You conduct a link audit. Simply put, a link audit is analyzing the links pointed to your site to make sure they are high quality and natural. Link audits will help you spot any harmful or unnatural-looking links.

WooRank’s Advanced Review is a great tool to monitor your backlinks to keep track of their quality. With an advanced review you get a good idea of the overall quality of your backlink profile. WooRank looks at a variety of link signals including the total number of backlinks, number of referring domains and overall backlink quality. You’ll also be able see how your backlink score compares against up to three competitor websites.

It’s worth noting though, that Penguin hasn’t been updated since October, 2014. That means anyone who got hit with a Penguin link penalty will still be feeling its effects, even if they’ve already done a link audit and disavowed any spammy links. However, a Penguin update, including real-time refreshing that should allow sites to recover after they have removed or disavowed bad links, is expected any day now.

Conducting Your Link Audit

Gathering Link Data

Your link audit starts by gathering all your link data. Google Search Console is the place to start. You can manually export your links from Search Console: Click on Links to Your Site under Search Traffic, and select More under "Who Links the Most" and download latest links. Since Search Console exports links as .csv files, use the convert text to column feature in the Data tab to separate the link from the date discovered. You can either keep this spreadsheet as your link audit spreadsheet, or copy and paste these URLs into a new one.

For a more robust dataset, create an account with Majestic (this will allow you to export your link data). Enter your domain in the search field (using your canonical URL!) and click on the Backlinks tab. Select the Use Historic Index option and choose the All option for "backlinks per domain". Export your data. Copy and paste the data into the same spreadsheet as the links from Google Search Console and remove the duplicate URLs.

Google Search Console and Majestic are the best places to start because you can get your link data from them. If you’re the type of person who really needs as much data as possible, you can also pay for a tool such as Ahrefs (they no longer offer a free trial).

Analyzing and Evaluating Your Links

Once you have all of your links in one place, it’s time to dig into them and find the links that are making you look bad to search engines. When evaluating the quality of a link, look at the following criteria:

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by Sam Gooch via SitePoint