Why You Need a Backlink Audit On Your Website

Do You Need A Backlink Audit?

Backlinks are the heart and sole of SEO.  Although there are many SEO Techniques, links from other websites that link back to your site is one of the most important factors in getting your site to rank well in Google and other search engines. Backlinks can also hurt your rankings if the sites that link back to you are not of high quality.  Having monthly audits to your backlinks is one of the most underutilized aspects of SEO.  Below will go into detail on Backlinks and how you can check them yourself.

How Do Backlinks Affect Your SEO?

If there is one main aspect that affects your SEO more than anything else, its backlinks to your website. Google spends an enormous amount of money to insure that their customer (the person doing the searching) receives relevant search results. Making sure that your site is “relevant” in Google’s eyes is the process of SEO.  One of the biggest factors in Google figuring out if your site or page is relevant is what websites are using YOU as an authority.  For instance, if a large, quality website such as Search Engine Journal is writing an article on SEO in New Orleans, and in that post, when they say the words “SEO in New Orleans” and those words were to link to your site—-Google looks at that and assumes that you are a very credible source of information for SEO New Orleans.  By that same rational, if you have a restaurant, and Zagat does an article on the best restaurants in New Orleans, and links to your site using those keywords —Google will assume that your site should be found for the search query of “Best Restaurants in New Orleans”.  Its not an easy process to get super quality sites to link to you—so naturally the sites with the best content for those keywords are the ones that get linked to.

So How Do Backlinks Hurt My Websites Rankings?

There is a constant struggle between what Google ranks websites for and SEO Guru’s exploiting that criteria.  At one point, Google didn’t look very closely at the QUALITY of the site linking to your site—they were looking for the sheer number of backlinks that were referring to your website.  Because of that, many SEO Companies would throw up a quick site and link out to all of their clients websites.  Do that a couple thousand times and you have a Private Blog Network or PBN.  The websites that were thrown up to do the linking out were never intended to be looked at by the general public–only to link out to other sites to grow their SEO.  Because sites were ranking that didn’t give Google’s customers the best experience (results not relevant because the SEOs were manipulating the search results) they made adjustments and started looking at the QUALITY of the links pointing back to you.  To take it a step further, they would actually penalize you if you had “bad backlinks” from a PBN.  So today — if you have links that point back to your site that are not of high quality, it can substantially hurt your search engine rankings or SERPs.

How Can I See Who Is Linking To My Website?

Most SEO Companies have a variety of tools to analyze your domain and your website.  One of the most basic functions is examining the back-links coming to your site.  If you dont have one of those super cool SEO Tools, the easiest way is to look at your Google Search Console reporting on your site.  If you dont have your site set up on Google Search Console (formally Google Webmaster Tools) — you REALLY need to do that ASAP as its contains a ton of great information on how Google interacts with your website and its FREE!.

How Do I Know If These BackLinks Are Good Or Not?

That is really where the rubber meets the road.  When you look over the backlinks that refer back to your site, you will recognize some of them…but not all.  You need to do some preliminary research on those backlinks to see what their domain metrics are.  This is where a good SEO Company comes into play.  They can look over those backlinks and quickly give reporting back to you on which links should be disavowed.  DEAN Knows will provide a full Backlinks Audit on your website and report back to you the strength and quality of each domain that is linking to you.