A link audit is a check and analysis of external links leading to the site, its individual pages and subdomain. I tell you why this audit is necessary.
This procedure has several reasons, which are easier to avoid than to deal with their consequences.
Getting a Manual Penalty from Google. You get a notification in Search Console that your entire site or certain pages have been filtered because of poor quality links. This is a 100% signal that it’s time to do a link audit.
A drop in traffic after Google’s search algorithm update. Search Console has no alerts on filter imposition, but there is a noticeable sharp loss of positions for keywords and a drop in traffic from search. Also a sign: it is time to urgently figure out what is happening with links.
But it is much better to monitor the link profile systematically, so as not to get hit by filters, not to lose traffic and profits. To understand the scale: you can lose 60-80% of your traffic in one week by getting caught by a filter. This is a good motivator to invest both time and effort in link auditing.
Link audit also allows you to find new opportunities to get links: if someone has already written about you, you can probably work with this site in the future or find a journalist with whom it is useful to establish a relationship.
How often should I do a link audit?
One to three times a quarter. If you have a competitive and fairly “spammy” niche – it is better once a month, if the links appear a little – once a quarter. Consider the stages of a reference audit.
Uploading all the links
You can use only Google Search Console, but it is desirable to take data from three or more sources to see a more complete picture, since Search Console is not reflected all external links.
As an example, I give you three sources: Majestic, Ahrefs and Search Console. All of them are available in Russian. Additionally, you can take the data from Moz.
Creating a table in Excel
Create an Excel table and upload all links from the three CSV files we downloaded earlier to it.
There are two options:
- Copy all the links from the CSV files into one Excel and delete the duplicates.
- Delete the duplicates through Notepad and add the list to Excel.
Before copying, don’t forget to remove the links from the Nofollow list. We don’t need them for analysis. In Ahrefs and Majestic, these links are marked with a special tag. Links from Search Console need to be checked manually.
How to improve the quality of data in the table?
Pull authority parameters from Majestic and Ahrefs (CT/TF and DR) to prioritize links: start with low authority links and end with the most relevant ones.
Write formulas in Excel and do not check by links, but by domains. This is true when you have a lot of links from one domain, such as through links, so there is no point in going through each one.
If you have a lot of links, it makes sense to improve the Excel file so that you can pull the Nofollow parameters for each link and remove duplicates, and leave information about Nofollow for links from Search Console that already exist in Ahrefs/Majestic.
After removing the duplicates, you will be left with a list of links to check. The longest and most correct way is to check the links manually and see in what context, on what resources they are located.