In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, backlinks remain a cornerstone of search engine optimisation (SEO). These inbound links from other websites to yours not only boost your search engine rankings but also lend credibility and authority to your content. However, not all backlinks are created equal. Some can be detrimental to your SEO efforts, while others can provide significant benefits. To maximise your SEO potential, it’s essential to have a robust strategy for checking and managing your backlinks.

This article will teach you how check backlinks like a pro. We’ll explore various tools and techniques that can help you identify high-quality backlinks, assess their impact on your SEO, and address any potential issues. By understanding the importance of backlink analysis and implementing effective strategies, you can optimise your website’s performance and drive organic traffic.

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or just starting your digital marketing journey, this guide will provide valuable insights and practical advice for effectively managing your backlinks. So, let’s dive in and discover how to elevate your SEO game through strategic backlink analysis.

What Is Backlink Analysis?

Nowadays, Google is more focused on user intent rather than the keyword phrases that users search for. In the past, any type of backlink would benefit your website. While Google never approved of bad links, they didn’t always have a system for identifying them. However, both the Panda and Penguin algorithm updates have made it obvious that Google values earned links rather than build links. 

So, if you want to boost search engine traffic, your backlinks are a good place to start. Backlink analysis is the process of examining and evaluating the links pointing to your website from external sources. These backlinks, also known as inbound links, are a critical component of search engine optimisation (SEO) because they contribute to your site’s authority, credibility, and search engine ranking.

The primary goal of backlink analysis is to assess the quality and quantity of these links, decide which ones are goods to keep and which are harmful to ignore, and also ensure they positively impact your SEO efforts. This involves examining various factors such as the relevance of the linking sites, the authority of those sites, and the anchor text used.

Good backlinks will increase your website’s organic traffic and search rankings. Therefore, you must perform an extensive backlink analysis before building or earning backlinks. Always keep a website’s domain authority in mind to evaluate the strength of an external link. 

It’s better to have a more strategic approach than to seek out links from any site simply. Hence it might make sense to seek the help of an established SEO agency or a search engine optimisation agency that can action this process for you.

What Is a Good Backlink?

Chances are, you receive plenty of advice to only focus on earning good backlinks. However, you may have no idea what makes a backlink good. You may not have read many definitions of a good backlink online because there is no comprehensive definition. 

In fact, there are many factors to remember when identifying a good backlink. At the same time, there is more to a bad link than it coming from spam or banned web pages.

In general, the more difficult it is for you to get a backlink, the better the backlink probably is. A good backlink is simply not very easy to get. Imagine attempting to get an authority link for your website from Forbes, the White House, CNN, or Google itself. Undoubtedly, a single backlink from one of these sources would increase your search rankings. However, the issue is getting the backlink in the first place.

In contrast, if a backlink is very easy to obtain, the value of the backlink is probably low. For example, if you want to get a backlink from a forum, you must add a link to your website in a reply. This link will remain up if no moderators strictly monitor the forum.

Now that you understand what a good backlink is, let’s explore what makes a backlink good in the first place.

Relevance

The first way you can determine whether a backlink is good is if it is relevant to your page’s topic. The more relevant the backlink is, the better it is. On the other hand, irrelevant backlinks will still make it difficult for you to convert visitors into customers, even if your web page is one of the top 10 pages in the search results for a keyword.

Even if an irrelevant link proves to be a good backlink for your website, you can expect your conversions to take a hit. Your website visitors will be confused and annoyed if they find that the content of a page does not relate to the content of the backlink. That’s why relevant backlinks are very important. 

Trustworthiness

Some search experts will even claim that 70% of the ability of a website to achieve an excellent search ranking is related to the sites referring to it. In other words, a good backlink will come from a trustworthy website in the eyes of Google. Therefore, you should use a tool such as TrustRank to evaluate the trustworthiness of web pages referring to your website.

That being said, not every link is equal in terms of its effect. Just one link from the Wikipedia website will do better than a dozen backlinks from websites with a low TrustRank. This is true even if the backlink from Wikipedia is nofollow and the backlinks from the websites with a low TrustRank are dofollow. This is because Wikipedia is considered a trustworthy website by Google.

If your website is not trustworthy, negative backlinks leading to your website will negatively impact your website’s search performance. That’s why many people lose their rankings when Google releases a big update because their backlinks are untrustworthy. Just because your web pages rank highly now does not mean that they will continue to rank highly in the future.

TrustRank refers to a ranking factor that permits Google to determine how a web page should be ranked. Of course, Google considers many other factors, not just a website’s trustworthiness. However, your focus should be on whether you trust a link to impact your website’s search rankings positively. Trust depends on links. 

Your TrustRank depends on the backlinks leading to your website. In the past, PageRank was the best metric for the quality of a backlink. However, TrustRank has now become the best metric. Google will not penalise any website that it trusts.

Links Within Content

Many people are unaware that the location of a backlink can impact the SEO value of the link. Links in sidebars and footers generally don’t have much weight. This is also true of all other site-wide links. 

The best links for improving your website’s authority are links within the content. These links are referred to as contextual links. A backlink is even better if the referring page is relevant and trustworthy. Google views contextual links from a relevant website as very trustworthy. Therefore, Google will reward your website significantly for these backlinks.

A contextual link can be an internal or external link. For example, you can rely on guest posting to boost your SEO campaign, but you should remember that guest post backlinks may not be as valuable. This is true because guest post backlinks tend to be in the author profile or bio area. A contextual link on the same web page would likely be more valuable.

Also, if you have identical anchor texts on the author bios of many different blogs and websites, it may hinder your website’s rankings. The issue that Google would cite is duplicate content. You need to have links in your author bios, and these author bios need to be different from blog to blog.

Google values contextual links because the search engine company is dedicated to providing users with better search results. Therefore, search results need to be based on both context and content.

When a search engine crawls a web page, the robots identify any links and evaluate the text surrounding the link. This will allow the robot to determine whether the anchor link is relevant to the content of the rest of the page. 

The robot will look for keywords they can reasonably expect to see if the anchor link is truly relevant to the rest of the content on the page.

Backlinks are incredibly important for improving the authority of your website. So, don’t hesitate to contact us for more information about how to check backlinks and improve your website’s backlink profile.

Conducting Backlink Analysis: Three Tools

There are a few different methods for conducting backlink analysis. For instance, several premium tools are specifically aimed at doing this. Let’s look at a few potential options.

Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker

Perhaps the most popular backlink analysis tool is Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker.

As the name suggests, Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker is a tool within the Ahrefs suite that allows users to analyse and monitor the backlinks pointing to their website or any other domain. It provides detailed information on the quantity and quality of backlinks, including data on referring domains, anchor text, relevance, traffic, and the strength of links. This tool helps users identify valuable links, detect potentially harmful ones, and gain insights into their link profile compared to competitors.

So, it is up to you to decide what threshold for each metric would mean a backlink should be kept or disavowed.

As Ahrefs allows you to check the backlink profile of any domain on the internet, it is also a very useful tool for competitor analysis. It’s also free.

SEMRush

Ahrefs’ competitor, SEMRush, also provides a robust backlink analysis tool as part of its comprehensive SEO suite, though it does not offer a free standalone version like Ahrefs. SEMRush’s backlink tool comes with a range of premium features that enhance its value for users.

One significant advantage of SEMRush is its integrated email outreach capabilities, which allow users to directly manage their link-building campaigns from within the platform. Users can gather contact details for site owners, send personalised outreach emails, and request the removal of unwanted backlinks. This seamless integration streamlines the process of managing and improving backlink profiles, offering a more efficient approach to maintaining a healthy link profile and addressing potential issues.

Majestic

The Majestic backlink analysis tool is a specialised SEO resource focused on providing in-depth evaluations of a website’s backlink profile. It offers comprehensive insights into various aspects of backlinks, including the number and quality of incoming links, the diversity of referring domains, and the distribution of anchor text.

Majestic is particularly renowned for its extensive link index and proprietary metrics, such as Trust Flow and Citation Flow, which gauge the authority and influence of links. Trust Flow measures the quality of backlinks by assessing the trustworthiness of the referring sites, while Citation Flow evaluates the quantity and strength of backlinks.

Such metrics help users determine the overall health of their backlink profile, identify high-quality link opportunities, and address potential issues. By utilising Majestic’s robust data and analytical tools, users can enhance their link-building strategies, improve their site’s SEO performance, and effectively monitor their competitive landscape.

Backlink Analysis: What to Do Next

As we mentioned earlier, one goal of backlink analysis is to identify toxic backlinks which you do not want to point towards your site. Once you have found these, you have two options for cleaning up your backlink profile:

• Asking the site administrator to remove the links to your site.
• Informing Google that you approve of poor backlinks and don’t want to be associated with them.

While the former option is more effective, it isn’t always feasible. For one thing, reaching the owners of disreputable sites is normally difficult. Even when you can get in touch, it’s still difficult to convince them to remove a link to your site.

Luckily, disavowing toxic backlinks is incredibly simple. Once you’ve figured out which backlinks you’d like to disavow, you must create a .txt file listing all relevant domains. Then, head over to Google’s backlink disavowal tool and simply upload this file. It’s that simple. After uploading this file, Google will no longer factor in links from these domains to your site.

Checking Backlinks for Your Website

Let’s recap. Backlinks are one of the most important factors which decide your ranking on Google. Because of this, many marketers put massive effort into maximising their backlink profiles. However, not all backlinks were created alike. Another way to check your website’s backlink profile is to use a Backlink Checker.

The purpose of a backlink audit is to separate the links that benefit your SEO from those that do it harm. This should be based on authority, relevance and natural placement.

Where you have discovered toxic backlinks, you should then take steps to remove or disavow these. Then, you can start worrying about replacing them with quality links, for instance, through guest blogging. Here is some additional reading for you on SEO and Backlinks in general:

• How to analyze a website
• Local SEO Audit: How To Perform One and What To Look Out For
• SEO Basics to Benefit Your Business Online
• Do Google Ads Help with SEO?
• 5 Ways Your SEO Strategy Will Change
• YouTube SEO: How to Beat the YouTube Algorithm

Advanced Backlink Strategies

While guest blogging and creating infographics are excellent starting points for building backlinks, there’s a whole world of strategies waiting to be explored. Here are a few advanced techniques to consider:

• Skyscraper Technique: This involves finding high-performing content in your niche, creating something even better (more comprehensive, data-driven, visually appealing), and then reaching out to the websites linking to the original content to suggest yours as a replacement.

• Broken Link Building: Identify broken links on relevant websites within your niche. Create content that serves as a valuable replacement for the broken link. Reach out to the website owner and suggest your content as a replacement, offering a dead-end link something valuable.

• Creating Linkable Assets: Develop content that is inherently link-worthy, such as in-depth research studies, industry reports, or unique data visualisations. This type of content naturally attracts backlinks as other websites reference your valuable insights.

• Domain Rating (DR) & URL Rating (UR): These metrics from tools like Ahrefs estimate the strength and authority of a website and individual webpage, respectively. High DR/UR websites typically pass more link value.

• Link Velocity: This refers to the rate at which you acquire backlinks. Sudden spikes in backlinks can raise red flags with search engines, so maintaining a natural link-building pace is crucial.

• Anchor Text Analysis: Analyse the distribution of keywords used in the anchor text of backlinks. An unnatural concentration of exact-match keywords can be a sign of manipulative link building.

Conclusion

Regular backlink analysis is crucial for developing an effective SEO strategy. By utilising the tools and techniques outlined in this guide, you can effectively monitor the health of your backlink profile, identify areas needing improvement, and uncover valuable link-building opportunities through competitor analysis and strategic outreach. Understanding link quality through advanced metrics will further refine your approach and boost your website’s ranking potential.

Remember, SEO is a long-term endeavour that requires ongoing effort and adaptation. Consistent monitoring and a focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks will drive sustained success. In addition to the premium tools discussed, there are also valuable free strategies to enhance your backlink profile. Engaging in online communities, guest blogging on niche sites, and leveraging social media can provide significant opportunities for earning quality backlinks. Combining these techniques with the insights from paid tools will create a comprehensive approach to achieving superior SEO results.

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