Link Audit: Essential Steps to Protect Your Website's Organic Traffic.

We've all been there. Suddenly, traffic to your company's website starts dropping. As you examine the situation closely, you try to figure out why organic traffic has fallen. You check whether the content is up to date, but that's not the issue. One of the common reasons for a drop in rankings is a backlink that has become harmful. As of 2021, links continue to be one of the important ranking signals in Google's search algorithm. Along with evergreen content, links are one of the main factors affecting your search engine ranking. The findings from over a billion web pages don't lie — as the number of referring domains increases, search traffic also increases: Source: Ahrefs However, having a large number of backlinks doesn't automatically gain traffic for your website — the type of links pointing to your website matters. Quality backlinks are great for your SEO. However, toxic backlinks can weaken your website's SEO over time. That's why distinguishing bad links from good ones is very important. So how do you prevent toxic links (which we'll explain later in the article) from negatively affecting your search engine rankings? You guessed it — by performing a basic link audit! Let's dive into the details of what a link audit involves and why it should be done regularly. If you're completely new to backlinks, you can read our link building introduction to understand the basics of link building.

What Is a Link Audit?

A link audit is the process of reviewing all the links currently pointing to your website. First, you'll need to find them. Then, you'll identify the harmful and quality ones. Finally, your company will develop a link strategy. You can manually review all your links and download a comprehensive list of links via Google's Search Console: Source: Google Search Central If your company has a large website with many referring domains, it may make sense to look at a third-party link service. Because doing a link audit on your own can be a significant burden in terms of time and resources if you're new to it.

What Is a Quality Link?

A quality link is a link from a site with high domain authority that is relevant and naturally placed, and points to your website. This site is considered trustworthy by both search engines and web searchers. Simply put, Google's site crawlers trust the website, and so do real people. The more trustworthy a website is, the more its domain authority rises, and thus higher quality links are provided. Wondering whether the site providing a link to your website has good domain authority? You can quickly see what you need by using SEO Review Tool's Website Authority Checker: Source: SEO Review Tools

What Is a Toxic Link?

Google's Penguin algorithm update may sound cute, but it's serious. First launched in 2012 and updated in 2016, Penguin's main goal is to identify and penalize sites with toxic or irrelevant backlinks. This practice is often called black hat link building. Google notices sites that implement suspicious link schemes to boost their rankings. If a site is buying links or getting links through networks built to boost Google rankings, Penguin will most likely detect them.

Basic Link Audit Steps

Follow the four simple steps recommended by Galactic Fed for a basic link audit:

1. Collect and Analyze All Links First, you need to find all the links currently sending traffic to your website. Using Google's free Search Console tool, you can get a comprehensive list of all your links, both good and bad:
   • Log into the dashboard and click on 'Search Traffic.'
   • Click on 'Links to Your Site.'
   • View the total number of links pointing to your website.

Don't forget to check out other valuable categories as well — for example, 'Who Links the Most' shows you the websites that provide the most links to your company. You can also view your most-linked content and see how other websites link to your content, for example which keywords they use. You can also use other link analysis tools.

2. Remove or Disavow Bad Links Now, after identifying all the good and bad links pointing to your site, you'll need to remove or disavow toxic links:
   • Key Questions to Ask When Disavowing: Take a look at the questions you should ask when disavowing bad links.

If you receive a manual action or think you'll receive one because of a link or link schemes that violate Google's quality guidelines, contact the site to have the link removed. If it's not possible to remove the link, you can use Google's tool to disavow unresponsive sites. Galactic Fed recommends a careful approach for the following reasons:

• Google can detect spam sites at the page level and devalue them, so your ranking is not affected.
• Sites may have a number of low-quality links over time, but unless this is causing ranking issues or negatively affecting the site's overall SEO, there's no need to disavow.
• We recommend disavowing links if the following issues are present:
  • A sudden increase in low-quality links is associated with a sharp drop in rankings.
  • There are previously paid links from sites with suspicious link profiles.

3. Review Your Anchor Text for Spam Anchor text is an important ranking factor in Google's eyes and is nearly impossible to manipulate.

Many free online tools are available that check your anchor text for spam or irrelevant links. Ahrefs offers a comprehensive paid version that provides a complete anchor text report quickly and easily, if you have the budget.

4. Identify and Build Valuable, High-Quality Link Opportunities Doing a link audit not only identifies toxic links, but can also offer opportunities to build high-quality links to your site that didn't exist before.

Reach out to the sites where you've detected lost or broken links. Identify web pages where more links can be built. Spot the gaps and create an outreach list using the competitor data you've analyzed via Google's Search Console.

Protect Your Organic Traffic

Do a simple link audit by following Galactic Fed's four steps; your organic traffic will thank you. If you're looking for more link tips, check out our five link building strategies you should know in 2021.