Shot #44: Link Audit

Hi

Here’s your shot. It’s a little long but totally worth your time :)

If your site starts getting traffic from unnatural/bad links, very soon you will lose rankings on search engine results.

Unnatural links might have generated if your SEO agency is not transparent with you on how they are building links for your website.

How to begin your link audit?

To begin the audit you should first know how a bad link looks like.

As per the guidelines given by Google, it can be of the following forms:-

• links from sites that are irrelevant to your domain(niche).

• links from sites with low domain authority and page rank.

• links from spammy blog comments.

• links from malware sites.

• links from sites that have not been indexed by search engines.

• links from web pages created with the only purpose of creating backlinks for a target page, to boost the search engine ranking of that page, also known as link farms.

These inbound links will hamper the site's SEO and ultimately your site will bear the consequences of bad links by ranking low on search results.

List of tools that can be used for audit

Now that you know what a bad link is, following are some of the tools that can come in handy to find them:-

• Google Webmaster Tools – is a free tool from Google where you can get warnings about unnatural links to your website. To use this tool, you have to insert a small code on your website to verify the ownership of the website.

• Ahrefs - is another great tool that can help in link audit. Data provided by this tool is limited in the free version but if you go for the paid version you will be provided with comprehensive about the website.

• Open Site Explorer - is a tool from MOZ which helps in analysing the site by providing details on metrics such as Spam Score. You can get the list of the site from which your website receives inbound links. Links from sites with high authority and low Spam Score will benefit your website in search result rankings and vice versa.

Now that you have identified bad links, what next?

You can recover your site from penalties only after you get rid of bad links. Following are some of the recommended options that you can consider to purge them:-

Contact Site Owners

You can send a polite request to the webmaster for the removal of links from their website. You can do this by sending a mail on the email ID given on the website. Alternatively, you can also find the contact details of the webmaster using WHOIS (if available).

Use Remove'em

Remove'em is a professional tool for removing bad links. It helps you identify bad links and also includes a database of more than 8 million webmasters. Their proprietary algorithm extracts your link data from all major sources and provides you with refined data.

Submit to Disavow Tool

If the Site Owners don't respond and you don't want to shell out money from your pocket, you can consider using Google Disavow Link Tool. You can find this tool in the Google webmaster dashboard. All you have to do is upload the sheet with the list of bad links. By doing this, you are requesting Google not to take into account the links submitted in the Disavow Tool while examining your website.

Only disavowing is not enough to get rid of bad links but apparently, you will find improvement in your Google rankings.

Found this shot interesting? Please share it on Twitter or LinkedIn.And, don’t forget to tag me 👇

Thanks,

LuvCo-founder ExperienceSaga.com

P.S: Connect with me on Twitter & LinkedIn(About Me)