How to do a backlink audit? Links to our page from other websites are called backlinks. Previously, in our article titled what is a backlink, we gave detailed information about what backlinks are and the types of backlinks. Links to your website from other sites may not always be useful for your site. Highly toxic backlinks can be sent to your website by malicious people. These links damage your website and cause you to lose ranking in search engines. This is where the website backlink audit process comes into play. With the audits you will make with the backlink audit tool, you can disawow harmful backlinks to your site from other websites and prevent them from negatively affecting your website in rankings. In this article, I will give you information about how you can do backlink profile audit with the simplest methods.
What is backlink audit?
Toxic backlink audit is the process of rejecting harmful links sent to your website from other websites. With this rejection, you inform the search engines that you are not taking these backlinks to your site as a reference. Thus, these incoming backlinks are not referenced by search engines and do not negatively affect your rankings.
How often should I do a backlink audit?
I do the seo link audit process on my websites every 15 days. I suggest that you do a backlink check every 15 days at the latest. With the latest algorithm updates, Google now excludes most harmful backlinks by itself and works to prevent them from harming your website. Although his explanations are so, my observations are that harmful backlinks still affect the search engine rankings of websites. For this reason, my advice to you is to perform a backlink audit process at least once every 15 days.
Is backlink audit important for seo?
Backlink audit is important in terms of SEO and it is a process that you should perform regularly. Backlinks to your website from spam or worthless sites can cause your site to become worthless and fall behind in the eyes of search engines. That’s why you should regularly review your website’s backlink profile and reject harmful links.
How to do seo backlink audit?
Let’s come to the answer to the question of how to remove toxic links, which is our main topic. According to Google sources, google webmasters tools is sufficient for the backlink audit process. The same answer was given to me for the question I asked about this in google forums before. So they just said that it would be enough to reject the backlinks coming to the links menu on the google search console.
I use both google search console and Semrush backlink audit tool for backlink audit. I suggest you to check backlinks with at least one seo auditing tool other than the google search console tool. For backlink control with Google search console;
- First, log in to the google search console page.
- Then click on “Links” in the left menu. If you wish, you can directly enter the “Links” page from here: google search console links.
- In this section, enter the “Top linking sites” section.
- Export this list with one of the export options.
- Check the backlinks in the list. Create a disawow list for those that might be harmful to your website.
- You can create the Disawow list via a notepad.
- To reject the entire domain, the example would be: domain: xyz.com.
- If you are only going to reject the relevant url, then paste the url directly into the notepad.
- Then it will be enough to upload this list to the google disawow tool.
- For this, log in to the google disawow application here: google disawow tool.
- Then upload the file you prepared. That is all. Thus, the Google disawow process will be completed.
Semrush backlink audit tool
The tool I use for the backlink audit process is the Semrush Backlin audit tool. Semrush is a paid SEO tool and you have to pay to use it. However, you can get a cheap Semrush account on the forums, or you can open a 14-day trial account and perform a backlink audit.
To check backlinks with the Semrush tool;
- First, log in to your Semrush account.
- On the left you will see the “Backlink Audit” section. Enter this menu.
- Then add your website from the “Create Project”section.
- Select the “Root Domain” section and click the “Start Backlink Audit” section.
- Depending on the size of your site, it may take an average of 1 hour to complete the audit process.
- After the audit is completed, you will see a page like the one below.
- I disawow all backlinks in the section Toxic and potentially toxic. I also advise you to disawow them.
- I also check for backlinks in the Non-Toxic section and add backlinks to the disawow list that I think may harm my website.
- Check the box next to the backlink you want to add to the Disawow list and you can disawow using one of the url or domain options in the Disawow section.
- After your Disawow list is ready, you can download your list directly from the Disawow section in the backlink audit section and upload it to the google disawow tool.
- If you have a disawow list that you have uploaded before, after the semrush backlink check is completed, first import your disawow list from the disawow section. Thus, if there are links that you have disawow, they will not be in the list.
You can increase your ranking in search engines by getting backlinks to your website from Wikipedia. To get backlinks from Wikipedia, you can visit our page on how to get a wikipedia backlink.
Backlink audit free
Ahrefs is the best and quality tool where you can do the backlink audit checklist process for free. Verify by mail after logging in to Ahrefs. Make sure to verify google search console for your website with the same mail. After adding your website to Ahrefs, Ahrefs will do the backlink audit for you free of charge.
Backlink audit Template
After checking the backlinks, you need to send the malicious backlinks you have detected as a domain or just as a URL to the google disawow tool. I am sharing the ready template with you below. You can simply create your own.
- Open a blank page with .txt extension on your computer with notepad.
- Paste the following format into the .txt file.
# exported from backlink tool
# domains
domain:
domain:# urls
- Add direct url to “Domain:”. For example domain: example.com.
- Under “# urls” paste the url you want to reject directly.
Save the file and upload it to the google disawow tool. That’s all.
Link audit is the name given to the process of detecting harmful backlinks coming to your website and sending them to the google disawow tool.
Harmful backlinks to your website will cause your site to become spam and lower its authority in the eyes of search engines. Backlinks are the reference of your website. If your references are bad, the value of your website in the eyes of search engines will also be bad.
The only tool I actually use for my site audit is the google search console application. However, from time to time, I also do backlink audit with Semruhs.
When checking backlinks, pay attention to the following: Look at the site authority, the similarity of the content with your site, the number of backlinks from the site, and when the site was opened. Most importantly, is the site spamming or producing original content? If you suspect it’s spam, I suggest disawow directly.
Especially applications such as Semrush ask you to access Google Search Console and Google Analytics applications during backlink audit. SEO tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs also take Google analytics data and perform backlink control. Because sometimes, tools like Semrush may not see the backlinks read by Google bots. Therefore, this control is requested from you.
