Why You Should Audit Your Backlink Profile. High-Quality vs Low-Quality Backlinks.

Monitor Your Backlinks with Backlink Audit

(We recommend the SEM Rush Backlink Audit Tool)

Backlinks are one of the most important variables of SEO. The quality of the backlinks to your site will make or break you.

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks, also known as incoming links or inbound links, are simply a link from one page on a website to a different website. Search engines like Google or Bing take backlinks under major consideration for SEO ranking. When one website links to another, search engines take that as a signal that the content is noteworthy.

What is a High-Quality Backlink vs. a Low-Quality Backlink?

High-quality backlinks are the preferred of the two. High-quality backlinks will boost your SEO ranking and give crawlers the impression that your site is a legitimized authority. There are a few different parameters to qualify a high-quality link.

1. Why should I audit my website backlink profile?
   1. Auditing your websites backlink profile will help you understand the quality of links pointing to your website.
2. How do I perform a backlink audit?
   1. Perform a backlink audit by using a tool such as SEM Rush & connect your Google webmaster console to the tool.
      1. Connecting your Google webmaster credentials to the SEM Rush tool will provide a more accurate view of who is linking to you.
3. What if I find bad links to my website in the audit?
   1. Locating bad links is the hard part. Make sure to sift through all your links & the ones you KNOW are harmful. Perform a Google Disavow request. (NOTE: Be very careful with the Google Disavow Tool. Only Disavow the backlinks you KNOW are harmful to your site.)

Domain Authority

If a website domain that is already high ranking and successful happens to have a backlink to your site, your viewership will increase.

 

Just like in everyday life, when an important person mentions someone else, everyone tends to feel like that person must know what they’re talking about. The same logic applies to search engine crawlers and domain authority.

Traffic

A link that is rarely clicked negates the entire purpose of the link. It is essential to have your link placed somewhere with high visibility so that users will click it, instantly driving traffic to your site.

Links that are placed in footers or sidebars are regularly overlooked. Typically, they are only noticed by web crawlers and not actual users. Backlinks that do not receive a decent amount of traffic may not improve your ranking.

Relevance

The website that is linking to your page should be similar in content, or at the very least in the same niche. For instance, if you have a pet accessory website and a surfing blog writes a post and includes an URL that links to you, this could actually hurt your ranking. Backlinks from sites that are not relevant are considered extremely low-quality.

Uniqueness

For a high-quality link to pack an even mightier punch, it’s best if the website linking you never publishes content with a link to a site that can be classified as your competition. Links that come from relative and authority sites that solely mention your website are a great opportunity.

 

Bad quality links are those that originate from sites that lack the above features. It’s easy to break these down into a few examples:

 

Spam sites, or sites with a surplus of ads and little content, are low authority and can hurt your ranking rather than helping it.

Another example would be sites that are completely unrelated to your niche. Google and other search engines will value this as a low-quality backlink, which of course, negatively impacts your ranking.

 

What Does the Backlink Checker Do?

Since backlinks are such an important element to SEO, it’s vital to have a way to check them. Backlinks are not inherently good for your ranking; depending on the quality of the backlink and the relevance of the site linking to you, your ranking can be affected negatively or positively.

 

The SEM Rush Backlink Checker will assist you with monitoring your backlink profile so you can be alerted immediately in the event that any low-quality sites link to you.

 

Also, you will be able to see potential link-building opportunities that can improve your ranking. The more positive, high-quality links you have, the more your site will benefit. With the ability to keep an eye on both your poor-quality and high-quality links, you can better understand what content your audience is most enticed by.

 

Make sure your backlinks are of reasonable quality, and no spammy websites are secretly hurting your ranking. Taking control of your backlinks is the first step to knowing where your site stands on the world wide web. By using the best Backlink Checker/monitor, you can rest easy knowing that no low-quality backlinks are hiding in the shadows.