SEO Tasks to Complete: Link Audit
In SEO, there are certain tasks to complete. One of them is link audit, which is vital in post-Penguin SEO world. A link audit is essential to maintain high-quality links in your site. A site that’s full of links coming from low-quality sites with an unnatural link can do more harm than good to your site’s ranking. It also results in a manual penalty causing your web pages to vanish from the search results.
If your site is old or you’ve hired an agency before for your SEO, it’s highly likely that your site has low-quality links that you may not aware of. To find them out, you need to conduct a link audit, which is a process of analyzing links that are pointing to your site to ensure that your site will only have high-quality and natural links.
Gather Link Data
Link audit starts with gathering all link data. The best place to start is Google Search Console.
Evaluate your links
One you have your data link in one location, you can now start digging into them. Find those links that make your site look bad to search engines. If your link profile is full of anchor text, make sure to change it as Google thinks you’re utilizing link spam. You should also look for anchor text that appears on unrelated page content.
Take action when a large number of your links are from IP addresses that are known to send spam. If your business doesn’t operate in, say, Russia, you should remove those links.
If you’re not sure how to manually check your links, you can hire an SEO agency to evaluate your links and mitigate them for you.
Disavow Links
After evaluating your links, it’s time to deal with low-quality links. One of the first things that you can do is to reach out to the owner of the site that hosts your link. You may request to remove the link or make it a no-follow one. It’s vital if your site has received a manual linking penalty.
However, if all your attempts at having those links removed failed, you should just disavow them. In a text file, include notes about when you requested those links to be taken down. You may also disavow entire domains. However, you should only use it with extreme caution. That’s because there’s a good chance that those domains are sending you good and bad links. You don’t want to disavow a domain that’s helping you through other links.
A link audit is a long and time-consuming task. However, cleaning all your links will show to the search engines that you’re committed to playing by their rules while providing your audience a quality user-experience.
