How to Perform Backlink Analysis

Effective backlink analysis is essential for outperforming competitors and crafting a successful backlink strategy. Without it, your efforts in link building may lack direction.

For link building agencies like ours, conducting a thorough backlink analysis is the initial step when working with a new client. This analysis provides vital insights crucial for devising an effective link building plan, including:

1. Identifying the client’s existing backlinks.
2. Understanding which pages and types of content attract the most links.
3. Recognizing and addressing potential issues.

In this article, we’ll cover:

➡️ The significance of backlink analysis.
➡️ Techniques for conducting this analysis.
➡️ How to utilize the obtained data effectively.

What is Backlink Analysis?

Backlink analysis involves conducting a thorough examination of a website’s backlink profile. This entails utilizing a backlink analysis tool to gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall link landscape.

The analysis uncovers all inbound links to the website, identifying areas for improvement such as broken links. It assesses the quality and quantity of backlinks and identifies which content attracts the most links.

This process allows website owners to identify issues and opportunities for enhancing off-page SEO and search engine rankings.

While typically performed on owned websites, backlink analysis can also be extended to competitor sites to gain insights into their backlink profiles. Both analyses play integral roles in any SEO strategy.

Without effective analysis, building a strategic approach becomes challenging, and surpassing competitors becomes more difficult due to a lack of insights.

Key Considerations in Backlink Analysis

During a backlink analysis, keep an eye out for:

1. Spammy links: Identify links from private blog networks (PBNs) and link farms, which can negatively impact your site’s rankings.
2. Broken links: Locate and address broken external links to ensure optimal link juice flow and authority distribution.
3. Popular content: Determine the types of content that attract links to replicate successful strategies.
4. Pages needing links: Identify pages that could benefit from additional backlinks to boost their rankings.
5. Competitor comparison: Assess your competitors’ backlink profiles to understand their linking strategies and gain insights for improving your own performance.

When to Conduct a Backlink Analysis

Understanding the importance of a backlink analysis and its benefits for your business, let’s explore situations where this analysis proves useful.

1. Before initiating a link building campaign: Performing a backlink analysis before launching new link building initiatives is crucial. It helps establish a baseline to measure the campaign’s effectiveness and identifies effective strategies. For instance, it reveals which content types have higher potential for generating links.
2. Periodically, to assess link building impact: Regularly analyzing backlinks allows you to gauge the impact of your link building strategies. Comparing initial metrics with current results helps determine the strategy’s relevance. Monthly checks on essential SEO metrics ensure link generation meets expectations.
3. After experiencing a ranking decline: A decline in rankings may result from detrimental backlinks. Conducting a backlink analysis during such instances helps identify issues and facilitates corrective measures.
4. In response to a manual penalty: Receiving a manual penalty from Google warrants a thorough backlink analysis to pinpoint and rectify violations in the link profile. Identifying and eliminating bad or spammy links is essential for penalty resolution.
5. Prior to purchasing a website: Performing a comprehensive analysis before acquiring a website enables informed decision-making. It uncovers potential issues like excessive bad links and highlights opportunities such as broken links that can be addressed post-acquisition.
6. In the absence of previous analysis: Even in the absence of specific triggering events, conducting a backlink analysis on your website remains valuable. It provides insights into achievements and areas for improvement, offering a clearer understanding of your link building progress.

Performing a Backlink Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now, let’s delve into the practical aspect of conducting a backlink analysis.

Firstly, you’ll require an SEO tool capable of providing comprehensive insights into backlinks.

At YourTrustedBacklinks, we rely on Ahrefs. However, several alternatives exist, including Moz, Majestic, and Semrush.

For assistance in selecting the most suitable backlink analysis tool, refer to our detailed guide on making the right choice for your requirements.

Start with a Website Overview Using a Backlink Checker

The initial step involves utilizing Ahrefs for backlink analysis to obtain a comprehensive overview of your website’s backlinks. This overview provides essential backlink data necessary for assessment.

Key metrics to focus on include:

1. Referring domains: These are websites that link to your site, with unique domains counted only once in the results, even if they link to your site multiple times.
2. Referring pages: This metric indicates the number of pages containing backlinks to your website.
3. Lost links and new backlinks: It reveals the overall count of backlinks gained or lost over time, offering insights into the dynamic nature of your link profile.
4. Country code top-level domain (ccTLD): This denotes the top-level domain code of the websites linking to your site, allowing you to identify links originating from specific countries.

Additionally, most SEO tools provide a domain authority metric, such as Ahrefs’ domain rating (DR) or Moz’s domain authority (DA). These metrics condense comprehensive information about your link profile into a single score ranging from 0 to 100, facilitating a quick assessment.

While the mentioned backlink data may not directly shape your link building strategy, it serves to establish a baseline and track your website’s progress over time.

Identify Your High-Performing Pages

An essential aspect of the analysis involves identifying the website pages with the highest number of links.

For instance, in Ahrefs, this report can be accessed by selecting the “Best by links” option under the “Pages” section in the sidebar.

Analyzing the top-performing pages by inbound links provides insights into:

• The pages with the most backlinks pointing to them.
• The distribution of dofollow and nofollow links for each page.

Identifying pages that attract links is beneficial for several reasons:

Creating Link-Worthy Content

Certain types of content have a higher likelihood of attracting backlinks. Original research, statistical data pages, tools, and thought leadership articles tend to garner more backlinks compared to informational content.

Understanding the content types that attract links enables you to replicate successful strategies. For instance, if a statistics page on your website receives numerous backlinks, consider creating similar pages covering different topics.

Utilize Content as Linkable Assets

Implementing a link building strategy centered around linkable assets, also known as skyscraper content, involves reaching out to website owners and encouraging them to link to your site’s content.

Pages already attracting organic links serve as excellent linkable assets, indicating their appeal to website owners for linking purposes.

Leverage Page Authority (PA)

Pages with a substantial number of backlinks often possess higher authority. Share this authority across your site by interlinking articles from these highly linked pages.

Identify high-value pages with significant backlinks that could benefit from enhanced rankings, and strategically add internal links to these articles.

Identifying Pages for Backlink Optimization

In the context of planning a link building campaign, the subsequent phase of your backlink analysis involves pinpointing pages that stand to gain the most from additional backlinks.

Strategically linking to these pages will optimize the effectiveness of your campaign on your website.

Several indicators suggest a page’s potential to benefit from additional backlinks.

Identifying High-Value Pages

High-value pages are those that have the potential to generate significant revenue for your business. These pages vary depending on the type of business:

• For e-commerce stores, high-value pages may include product or category pages.
• For SaaS companies, sales pages might be considered high-value.
• Affiliate websites may find that reviews or “best of” type content are their high-value pages.

By generating backlinks to these pages, you enhance their likelihood of ranking higher in search engine results, thus increasing visibility to potential customers.

Pages Ranking Outside the Top Five

Pages ranking at the bottom of page one or on page two of search engine results, although not in the top five positions, can still benefit from backlinks. Google’s trust in these pages is evident by their appearance in search results. A few backlinks could propel these pages up the rankings, resulting in significant organic traffic gains.

Comparative Analysis of Backlink Numbers

Conducting a competitive analysis can inform your link building strategies by highlighting pages with fewer backlinks than their competing counterparts. Pages on your site that are outranked by content with more backlinks present opportunities for improvement. By strategically building backlinks, particularly to pages where the gap in backlink numbers is small, you can level the playing field and enhance your ranking prospects.

However, it’s essential to be realistic about your goals. While competing with pages that have thousands of backlinks may be challenging, focusing on pages where the disparity in backlink numbers is minimal offers a more achievable target.

Identifying Broken Backlinks

Detecting and rectifying broken links constitutes a crucial aspect of backlink analysis, ensuring that all backlinks contribute maximum authority to your website.

Broken backlinks commonly occur due to:

1. Linking to deleted content URLs.
2. Typographical errors when adding links.

Most backlink analysis tools offer features to identify broken backlinks easily. For instance, in Ahrefs, navigate to the “Broken Backlinks” section to access a list of broken links pointing to your site.

This report highlights:

• The referring page containing the broken link.
• The error message encountered when users click on the link.

With this information, you can determine whether the issue lies in the absence of the linked page or if it’s due to a typographical error.

How to Address Broken Backlinks

Rectifying broken backlinks can be challenging since you lack control over the links pointing to your site. However, several options are available:

1. Recreate the Page or Set Up a Redirect: If the error stems from the deletion of a page, consider recreating the page or setting up a redirect. This ensures that visitors directed to the old URL are redirected to a relevant page of your choice.
2. Contact the Website Owner: In cases where the error results from a typo on the linking website, reach out to the website owner and request a correction. Politely ask them to update the link to the correct URL.
3. Implement a Redirect: If the website owner is unwilling or unable to rectify the typo, you can set up a redirect from the erroneous URL to the correct page on your site. This ensures that visitors are seamlessly redirected to the intended content despite the error.

While fixing broken backlinks can be challenging, exploring these options can help maintain the integrity of your website’s link profile and ensure a seamless user experience for visitors.

Identifying Spam Links

Spotting spam links, originating from low-quality domains like private blog networks (PBNs) or link farms, is crucial during backlink analysis. These links can lead to manual penalties or drops in rankings, making their detection essential.

While no single indicator confirms a link’s spammy nature, several signs can help identify toxic backlinks:

Irrelevant Country Code Domains

Be wary of linking domains with country codes that do not align with your website’s target audience. For instance, if you target an English-speaking U.S. audience but receive numerous backlinks from domains with a .cn (China) country code, it may indicate spammy activity.

Suspicious Domain Names

Pay attention to domain names that seem suspicious or irrelevant. Signs include nonsensical names, domains suggesting offensive or NSFW content, or domains unrelated to your website’s niche.

Anchor Text

Spam links often feature anchor text that does not correlate with your website’s content. Reviewing the anchor text report can help identify links with suspicious anchor text, signaling potential spam activity.

When delving deeper into anchor text analysis, watch out for signs resembling those indicating suspicious domain names:

• Nonsensical anchor text.
• Irrelevant anchor text.
• NSFW or adult-oriented anchor text.

Handling Spam Links

Upon identifying potentially spammy links, it’s crucial to verify their legitimacy by visiting the linked pages directly through your backlink checker.

Observe for the following signs indicating spam:

• Poorly written content.
• Templated or low-quality website design.
• Absence of “About” or “Contact” sections.
• Presence of unrelated articles with numerous external links.

If the linked website displays one or more of these indicators, it may warrant action to remove the link.

Google’s disavow tool offers a straightforward method for addressing spam links. Compile a list of domains you wish to disavow and upload it to Google.

Refer to Google’s official instructions for detailed guidance on the disavowal process.

Analyzing Competitors’ Backlink Profiles

The final step involves replicating the aforementioned process for websites competing with yours. This analysis provides valuable insights into your competitors’ strategies, enabling you to identify effective tactics and apply them to your own strategy.

Key findings from analyzing a competitor’s site may include:

1. Content Analysis: Identify the types of content that attract links by examining pages with the highest number of backlinks.
2. Backlink Sources: Determine which websites link to your competitors by reviewing their incoming links.
3. Content Ranking Without Many Links: Identify content that ranks well despite having few backlinks. Replicating similar content presents an opportunity to achieve high rankings without extensive link building efforts.

For more in-depth guidance on analyzing competitor backlinks, refer to our comprehensive guide on the subject.

What’s Next?

After completing the outlined steps, you’ll have a clearer understanding of your link profile. Utilize the gathered data to shape your link building campaigns and other content strategies, enabling you to monitor progress and measure success effectively.

For further guidance on the next steps, explore our extensive collection of articles tailored to assist you in your endeavors.

Explore our resource page highlighting effective strategies for acquiring links from high-authority pages. Additionally, learn how guest posting can secure impressive links for your business by visiting this page.

Concluding Thoughts on Backlink Analysis

Conducting a thorough backlink analysis using a reliable backlink checker is invaluable for assessing your website’s inbound links and gauging your competitors’ performance.

Moreover, it aids in guiding your overall link building endeavors by pinpointing reputable sites for potential link opportunities.

By comprehending your site’s performance, you can pinpoint areas for enhancement and set the stage for a successful link building journey.

To learn more about our meticulous link analysis process at yourtrustedbacklinks.com and how we optimize our clients’ websites, please visit our website and reach out to us. We’re eager to share further insights with you.