Asses Your Website’s Backlinks without Cost to your Small Business
Over 80% off all search traffic goes through Google search engines. Meaning we are all a slave to Google’s rules whether you like it or not. In 2012, Google released “Penguin” an update that focuses on your websites offsite profile. It’s judging your site on the amount and quality of the links.
The challenge with a backlink profile is that no matter how many good and natural links you build or are built to you. You can’t stop the bad links built to your site, The more successful your website the more low level links you will receive.
Our guide will show you how to find your backlinks and asses them without needing to employ an outside agency.
Google Search Console, SEM Rush and Majestic
The three main tools you need are available for free. GSC is free and if you don’t have it you may need a developer’s help. It’s a 5 minute jon and offers insight into how your website is assesed. Majestic and SEM Rush offer 1-month free trials you can sign up to. They will allow you to download the links to your site and compare the work.
If you use SEM Rush to connect you GSC and Majestic accounts together. It will produce you one large list of all the links that you have to your website for you to start assessing the sites.
Whittle Out the Worst Quickly
You could have 1,000’S of backlinks to your website and potentially every one of those links need to be checked manually. When checking our own site My Favourite Voucher Codes we assessed over 30,000 links in February 2017.
First step is to remove the dead weight we know doesn’t work.
- Domain Authority (DA) – Any website that has a DA of under 20, mark as To Be Deleted (TBD). These sites may grow but in the majority of cases this is a low-quality site.
- Spam Score – Any site with a score above 3 means its not healthy so mark it TBD
- International sites: If you are a UK business filter any sites that are obviously not UK (unless you work with certain countries).
- Keep .com, co.uk, .org, .net, .uk and possibly .ie (Ireland) as an example
In 99 of 100 instances all these links can be deemed as low quality and you don’t need to look at each one individually.
Asses the Good Links from The Bad
Having removed the dead weight we suggest you start with checking each remaining link individually. If you deem a site low quality, you can then mark all links from that site as low level.
- Simply you are looking for good quality site that is relevant to your business and looks like a natural fit.
- If a website is not in English, its probably not a good link if you are an English business
- Porn, Insurance, Gambling websites are natural offenders but ensure the links to you are appropriate to your business. TBD any that are not.
- If you think the site looks rubbish and is a bit weird its probably not very good quality so it’s time to add to TBD
- The main point is if it looks weird it probably is and should be TBD.
Don’t forget when you have done this work you need to contact the website to request they remove your links. Then complete a Google Disavow to ensure you are only judged on quality links.
This process takes a lot of time. When we assessed 30,000 links it took us a full working week just to assess but it doesn’t need to be costly to you. If your website has seen a drop in its rankings or doesn’t seem to be achieving its worth this could be worth the time investment
