If you want to run your business successfully, your online content should be neat and clean. If your backlinks are broken or misleading, it can have serious consequences for your business. They might benefit you in terms of generating traffic for a short while, but in the long term, they’ll cost you dearly. Some bad backlinks are tolerable. But if a search engine detects a pattern or a well-established practice, you’re in jeopardy. Even if you’re not guilty of actively throwing them online, your content could still have bad links generated by SEO and PBNs. Hence, backlink inspection is a necessity if you want to keep your content immaculate. But what is a backlink audit in the first place? In plain words, it’s the process of removing or repudiating damaged backlinks. 

 

It’s no surprise that if you want to get rid of something, you first need to locate it. In this case, you’ll need to gather all of your backlinks at one point. While it’s almost impossible to fetch all of them, you can still strive to reach as near as possible to the ideal by using different tools.

You require a backlink auditing tool in addition to others. It could simply be used with other tools to check your backlinks.

 

It is an apparatus that’s free of cost to use and helps you grasp the reasons behind the performance of your website. It allows easy Google access to your site. It also assists in cleaning spam, uploading new content, and removing the old one.

After opening it, verification for your website is required, and after that, you link it to your Google email account. There’s an overview page that shows your overall performance and opportunities for improvement. You can open it to go in-depth. You can also use the sidebar.

Below this is Performance. Clicking on that would let you check graphs of your performance. It shows you the data from the last three months, but you can modify dates according to your needs. You can check the click-through rate tells you how many people who see your ad click on it as well. Clicking on queries would let you know topmost queries related to click-through rates, clicks, and the like. It means you have your questions answered for everything on the blog.

You can click on URL inspection and check whether a specific URL has been indexed or not. The index section is split into four different parts. The error includes the pages that haven’t gone through the indexing process. This allows you to fix any problems. 

Valid with warnings is the section that contains URLs that have been indexed but are facing issues. Valid has pages that have been indexed but may not have been submitted yet. Excluded includes those pages that don’t go through indexing. But that doesn’t mean there’s an issue. Maybe they’re going through the indexing mill, or you’ve excluded them.

Sitemaps, as the name suggests, has everything related to your sitemap. It shows you the time when it was uploaded, last checked, and how many URLs it contains. This is the place where you can update your sitemap too.

To check compatibility with smartphones, you can click on the enhancement section. In the error section, you can see which URLs are causing trouble. Check those URLs on your phone to confirm if the problem is present or not.

Security and manual actions will let you deal with any security problems. If there aren’t any, simply click on no issues detected.

The Link section has four different parts. Top linked pages are those that have created the most number of linkages to your website from external websites — top linking sites show which sites have linked most to your pages. The top linking text talks about anchor text, which is a piece of text that links to your website. Then there are internal Top link pages as well, which tell you how your pages are performing internal linkages. The Settings part contains administration controls and permissions that different users have. 

 

 

It keeps track of your backlinks in three types of categories: live, recent, and historical. It’s ideal for downloading all of these.

Its Dashboard displays the most critical data. Backlink strength comparison with other sites, sturdiness, and standard of your backlinks, the number of pages and domains that link to your site, and organic ranking of keywords – all of these are included in the Dashboard.

Site Explorer provides you in-depth information about any website. Just paste the URL in it, and it’ll give you all the relevant data, including backlinks, sources of those backlinks, and keywords that have been hyperlinked. 

Content Explorer shows you the articles that have been shared the most on social media platforms.

The keyword not only provides you the current status, but it also helps you enhance your keyword strategy. It informs you about clicks. You can save keywords and can use them anytime you want. Its Site Audit feature improves SEO performance by identifying any SEO problems.

 

When using Moz, select the file you want from Quick Downloads. There are other tools as well, but they might demand from you to spend cash. Why spend money on something when you’re getting it free of cost from somewhere else?

You can check your rankings and see how your competitors are faring. It has a dashboard that shows basic data. If you explore it further, it has a Ranking section that shows your position. You can compare your current status with previous positions to evaluate your performance.

It analyses your visitors thoroughly. It tells you from which particular path they reached your platform. This informs you about the keywords being used by people to access your website.

Moz offers impeccable Crawlers to diagnose your website for any ailments it might have. It creates detailed reports about the issues and informs you as soon as it finds them. This means your website is saved from any errors for pleasurable user experience. 

 

After piling them up, it’s time to organize those links. Due to the usage of different tools, there’s a strong possibility of having duplicates. If you download them in CSV, open them in Excel. That’s because only URLs are required. There are other metrics with the originally downloaded items, but they’re not desirable here. The next step is to transfer them from Excel to Notepad ++, which helps in getting rid of the duplicate links. 

 

To start the auditing process, you first need to select a tool for it. If you plan on doing it manually, please note that it will result in mental fatigue. The tool we’re using for it is Linkody. After registration, which is quite simple, you can link it with Google Analytics. This will enable it to detect your new links faster and access more data.

You can add your domain and let your backlinks be automatically discovered. Linkody finds a lot of backlinks itself, but you should add them manually, as well. You can upload your CSV files. There is no need to worry about duplicates since Linkody will identify them effectively.

 

• The main purpose of auditing is to categorize links into good and bad. The best source for evaluating this is Goggle Webmaster Guidelines. If you’re undecided among some links, just think if you want them to provide a pathway to your website.

 

• Dealing with a lot of them, you’ll be able to apprehend bad links swiftly. Linkody gives every link a spam score that decides its value. If a link is good, you can add a Good tag with it. If it’s bad, you can disavow that specific link or the whole domain that contains such links. Disavow a domain completely only if you’re sure it’s full of spam.

 

• The Tags tab, you can see all the tags you’ve added and the links with them. One link can have many tags associated with it. You can opt for adding, deleting, or removing that at any time. Disavowed links and domains can also be checked. After a final, confirmatory look, you can proceed to export the file. 

 

After disavowing links, upload them to the Google Disavow File. The file exported from Linkody is ready to be uploaded. There’s no modification required. After uploading it, you’ll get an email in your search console. Disowning bad links might affect your website for a while, but it is highly beneficial in the long run. And it’s not a one-time thing. Ideally, it must be done once a week. 

It appears that backlink auditing isn’t as easy as it sounds. But it’s difficult only for the first time since you need to arrange everything. After doing it regularly, it becomes easier to handle, and your speed improves as well. If you don’t want to perform it yourself, online services are available to serve you.