The link audit is the review that as an SEO analyst a web page is carried out to find poor quality, broken or duplicate links. The quality of the links is very important for a web page, it may depend on it that Google indexes its content properly and that it does not penalize you for duplicate content. Also with a link audit you can see the backlinks of the site, and thus quickly understand how powerful your link profile is.

The backlinks, or retro links allow to shape a website, define its personality and locate a little more to Google on the functionality of this website. Of course, these links that are obtained from other websites also give more strength to your profile, and sometimes it is one of the goals of many SEOs to be able to give visibility to the website and scale as a reference in a subject. Example: if you are an ecommerce and add a blog to your website, you will be able to talk about different topics from professional and researched perspectives that may be useful for your clients.

The backlinks you manage to get may depend to a great extent on the quality of your content. Everyone wants to be tagged by referrers, so in this case one way to get them is by being the best. A link audit will also help you improve the user experience with your website, because nothing is worse than redirecting a user to a duplicate page or one that “no longer exists.” So take these steps into account to do it.

How to do a link audit? 

To get down to work and carry out a link audit it is necessary that you know the SEO tools that can help you do it. But we will start by pointing to all those steps that you must follow once you have it, so that in the best of cases, you know what SEO professionals are looking for when doing a good audit of backlinks and links in general on your website:

1) As a first step, you should verify that no if you have spam links on your website. Spam links will be all those that originate from pirated domains, poor quality content, dubious origin, pornography or websites not indexed by Google. Because of having links of this type, it is possible to have a penalty for the Penguin algorithm.

2) Next, look for hidden links. Make sure to track down all those links that you consider are hiding something behind the code. These are usually easy to find, because their name is often unusual and flashy. Although users cannot see with the naked eye, they can come from non-Google and unprofessional pages. That they get traffic in an unusual way and their content is in many cases penalized.

3) Look for natural anchors and avoid over-optimizing the anchors by all means. As much as we look for keywords to climb positions in Google, we must not forget about quality. Forgetting the “natural anchors” and starting to create meaningless texts just to link content, it is not a very ethical practice. I recommend combining the presence of anchors that refer to the word you want to link with some words like “here” or “go to this link”.

4) Then you need to investigate if your blog or website is receiving links from other domains that are under suspicion. Because sometimes, it is not only that some bad practices seek to link to these sites, because depending on your profile authority, some of those suspicious websites mentioned above will seek to link you to take advantage of that, but our recommendation is that you manage to send them to spam. If this happens to you, they should check the status of the domains from which they receive the links: Go through them to verify that they have quality content and that they are not content farms, and that they do not exceed the number of outbound links, which is unnatural.

Tools that can help you perform a link audit

Today there are many tools that can be very useful when making a correct audit of links. Although in general you can do a general review of the website with all of them, this time we will show you the most functional ones, from the side of the links:

Ahrefs:  

Ahrefs is the quintessential tool for conducting an SEO audit, ideal also for conducting a link audit. With Ahrefs you can keep track of the type of domains that are linking to us, and verify that their origin is appropriate. In addition to being able to verify the number of links that your website is receiving, you will also see the cloud of anchors and you will have access to the search for backlinks that have appeared naturally on your page and those that have not.

This tool can also show you competitive analysis, do keyword research, verify content with higher visibility, track rank, monitor your website in general, and overall site improvement. Ahrefs lets you start with a 2-week free trial of any of their plans.

Sitrix

SISTRIX is a very good tool that allows you to carry out a thorough study of your website, but it is also considered one with more database of links since the integration with Majestic. This tool is quite loved and appreciated by SEO analysts because it does not limit its functions like other tools at the level of links, although it is just as paid as the best in its range. The SISTRIX tool has the function of ordering external links according to the host’s visibility index, that is, placing priority on all those domains that Google considers trustworthy.

With it you will be able to do a detailed search and investigation of links because it has functions such as the “Best referring domains” report. That allows you to see at a glance the websites that are linking it and that could be of good quality or not. This easy to read and find feature is a favorite. In addition to combining the visibility of the “Deep Links Index” report that can easily detail if there has been a bad practice to gain strength in the profile. For example, having almost 95% deep links is considered strange if your website is not dedicated to the publication of daily news or if you are considered a new page. And also that all the links were against home.

Majestic

Then there is Majestic, a tool considered fast and easy to use. Loved by many SEO professionals because it provides so much information. Majestic is a large link index database, the largest known. And it shows several metrics that will be quite useful, it lets you see on the results page: the number of external backlinks, referring domains, a backlink breakdown graph, anchor text and tons of other data that if you are a professional you will be able to take advantage of much.

Like all tools, Majestic is paid but it comes with a trial version that you can use and prove first-hand that everything that is said about it is true. Its vital functions when conducting a backlink audit, is that you can access the backlinks tab on the results page, you have access to a Lost tab, where you will see the backlinks that have stopped pointing to your site in the last 90 days. Majestic certainly has many unique features, so it’s worth taking a few minutes and setting up a free account. How to do a link audit?

Although our best recommendation is that you leave them to professionals, if you have already used these tools before, you will know what we are talking about. But if you are still married to just one, we invite you to go through them with their free trials and you can discover how deep they can be.

How to do a link audit?