Here’s how to keep your link profile healthy and prevent poor backlinks from becoming bad enough to hurt you by doing regular link profile audits.
An assessment of your link profile is essential to any SEO campaign.
It is important to conduct regular link profile audits to discover and delete poor connections before they negatively affect your site’s rating.
The use of proactive measures is always preferable to corrective ones.
According to the most recent Google adjustments, even sites that haven’t been building links for the previous five years are being penalized (at least).
Consistent link profile auditing is essential for maintaining a good link profile and preventing poor connections from becoming problematic in the future.
Link remediation is a term that some in the industry use to describe this process.
Consider it risk management, or rather, risk minimization.
Competition may seek to artificially increase its link profile by building poor backlinks from a competitor’s website.
Consequently, your site will be penalized by Google’s algorithm since it will be seen as if you are actively developing such connections.
I’ve seen a few effective negative SEO link assaults, so I know they exist.
While everything was going smoothly on these websites, a considerable surge in bogus incoming links began to wreak havoc.
This is why regular link profile audits are so important in keeping a healthy link profile and ensuring that your poor backlinks don’t grow so terrible that they might hurt you.
The apps we’ll need to conduct a link profile audit are listed below.
Examples of Useful Software
Since the more data sources you have available, the better your link risk management activities will be if you employ a variety of programmes.
I will use at least five references if you have them available.
In addition to these five sources, you may always utilize other ones:
In the meanwhile, what exactly is bad SEO?
Table of Contents
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- Google’s search engine optimization (SEO) tool
- SEMrush
- Majestic
- Ahrefs
- Tools by Raven
- Browser-based tool for linking to other websites
- Link Cleanse
1. Positive Link Speed
This refers to the rate at which your link profile is growing. Google may consider a link profile that grows too quickly to be a link manipulation method.2. The Velocity of Negative Links
The removal of too many connections at once.3. Contextually relevant links
Within the page’s context, hyperlinks are relevant to the topic. You get extra points if the material you’re using sounds natural and has some substance rather than spammy. This time, though, you should be on the lookout for excessive use of contextual linking since this might be abused.4. Sponsored Links and Other Terms Surrounding a Link
Links that are sponsored or paid for.5. From the “hub” pages
These are the most authoritative sites on the subject.6. Links from high-ranking websites.
Large authority sites in a certain field generally provide these kinds of connections. Being linked to high-authority sites is beneficial, and it shouldn’t be considered bad.7. Links with a Natural Profile
Link anchor text is distributed more naturally in a natural link profile, which means that no one anchor text type dominates the link profile in any major way. In other words, rather than a single individual repeatedly connecting to the site, it seems that many people from a variety of niches (or within the same niche) did so.8. Reciprocal Links
In their Google Webmaster Guidelines, cross-linking, a form of linking strategy that Google forbids, is essentially “link to me and I will link to you.”9. The use of links to user-generated content
They are links that show up in the comment section of blogs.10. Inappropriate comments on a blog
Scrape Box, a well-known black hat malware, is notorious for its blog commenting capabilities, and hence excessive blog commenting might be perceived as originating from Scrape Box.11. Links originating from 301 Permanently Moved URLs
Links from 301 redirects should not harm your site in and of itself. Having too many redirects, on the other hand:- Your website will be slowed down.
- Your result in a lack of available bandwidth (it may not be an issue if you can afford significant amounts of traffic hitting your 301 redirects).
- Crawling becomes more difficult if these concerns are not effectively addressed.
- They may grow to the point that managing them becomes a difficulty.
12. Anchor text for internal links
Spam is any overuse of a single form of internal link anchor text and should be avoided at all costs. Using the same “Georgia widgets” link several times is a bad idea. Instead, you should include various anchor texts in your link profile. Diversify it as much as possible to make it look more organic rather than staged.13. Age of Backlinks
According to a Google patent, backlink age is an important ranking component.14. The total number of links pointing away from the page
One school of thought holds that pages with an excessive number of outbound connections perform much worse than pages with an appropriate number of outbound links. This is known as the link density hypothesis. Although this was formerly true, it is no longer so. Although Matt Cutts, a former Google employee, has claimed that they no longer require a maximum of 100 links on a page if the connections are too spammy.15. Site-wide links
In his video How Does Google Consider Site-Wide Backlinks, Cutts discussed this topic. Although he verified that they compress the links into a single link, he also said that if the connections are very spammy, a human webspam analyst might consider other measures.16. Link Anchor Text that focuses too much on one keyword
Having a link profile where no more than 20% of your links originate from one sort of site, one form of spam, or centred on one single term is often permitted. The more options you have, the better off you will be.17. Too much or too little link velocity is a common problem.
Getting many links in a short time might hurt how well your site performs in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is particularly true if it forms a significant element of your link profile (approaching 50 per cent or much more). Having a low link velocity isn’t usually a bad thing. An issue with link velocity arises when one source produces too many links at too high a rate to be of any use to the rest of your link profile.18. An inappropriately large number of links coming from a single domain (Part of Link Velocity, But an Investigative Factor)
As a result, Google may note that this domain may be assisting the target site’s link building efforts. When it comes to link building, overdoing it may be called spam if it’s done too often and too quickly; thus, the aim here is to keep things in proportion.19. Excessive links to one’s forum profile
These connections might lead to the black hat side using a tool like XRumer or Scrape Box to modify hyperlinks. It’s easy to create and edit forum profiles using these tools.20. Splogs vs. Real Sites: Which Should You Trust?
Nowadays, a splog, or spam blog, is easily recognizable. Blogs produced as part of a larger network may all have similar designs and include comparable material. If the splog network is well-developed, they may even take care of producing high-quality material themselves. However, the majority of the variables in these splog networks will be the same and can be readily identified.21. Guest Posts
Many people don’t like guest articles these days since they’re so easy to manipulate and may go the same way as article marketing. It’s possible that, if done right, they may be beneficial, particularly if they provide unique and valuable material. When guest articles are the only thing you’re doing to improve your link profile, it may quickly go from good to poor.22. Inexplicable Flow of Links
The subject of connection velocity has already been addressed and discussed in another part of this paper.23. The penalty imposed by Google
Use Barracuda’s Penguin tool to detect not only whether you have a penalty but what kind of punishment you have as well. To help you better understand how Google penalizes your site, it offers a tool that overlays Google Analytics statistics with information on individual penalties, including not just Penguin but Panda and many other algorithmic and manual measures that have been taken. It will make it easy for you to figure out what is wrong. It’s a good idea to check Google Search Console and Google Analytics to see if there’s any evidence to back up your claim before taking any more action. There is a good chance that your site has been impacted by a substantial update before the penalty.24. A high percentage of low-quality links in your link profile
Low-quality sites, such as spammers’, are notorious for the following types of links:- Gambling
- Porn
- Viagra
- Links in blog comments that are much too many
- Scam sites that post a lot of the same stuff again and over
- Networks of blogs
- Sites for Article Promotion
- Articles containing links with relevant anchor text.
- Press releases posted on other websites only to generate a backlink
- Linking to low-quality directories or social bookmarking sites is a waste of time and resources.
- Links from PPC advertising campaigns that send PageRank to the buyer of the ad.
