Infusionsoft SEO – Backlink Audit

A Backlink Audit Is Vital For Search Engine Rankings

You already understand the importance of a full SEO Site Audit and how this affects your search engine rankings.  Now we cover the backlink audit it more depth:

In line with Google's Penguin and Panda algorithms, link building is one of the most important on-going tasks as part of any SEO content campaign. Inbound backlinks are the most weighted relevancy signal in Google's algorithm – next to content relevancy which is concerned with and specific to underlying “search intent”.  (You can read more about the significance of these two algorithms, and how they changed SEO forever, in this article here.)

Quality, editorial, inbound links are an extremely important metric which tell Google how much “authority” your site holds in your industry under a given topic or keyword.

White Hat Is The Only Sure Way Forward

As a result, it's no wonder, then, that people are often tempted to hack this backlink metric or apply any number of dubious short-cut methods in an attempt to trick Google into providing them with a better search position than it otherwise would have done. These people would need to be advised though: Penguin is advanced! Just about all manner of trickery (that we know of, anyway) would certainly end up being detected, and result therefore in a search engine ranking penalty!  And this would be a penalty extremely difficult to recover from.

The short version of this article would be this:

Link farms, link networks, paid links, forum spam, etc. etc ….

Instead, carry out regular, periodic Backlink Audits and ensure that your backlink profile is free from toxic links. You then make sure that you implement a Quality Content Formula which will help you secure natural, editorial inbound links to your website and build a solid and genuine “trust and authority” score.

The longer And More Detailed Version

In 2012, Google officially launched the “webspam algorithm update,” which specifically targeted link spam and manipulative link building practices. The webspam algorithm later became known (officially) as the Penguin algorithm update via a tweet from Matt Cutts, who was then head of the Google webspam team.

Ever since 2012, updates and advancements have continued to roll out. Here is a link to Google's Webmaster Guidelines, which covers quality guidelines with respect to link schemes, hidden links, user generated spam, paid links, and more.

In line with the Penguin Algorithm, it is important that we look for a full and complete range of ‘toxic markers' in your backlink profile.

Within Link Network Pages we look for:

• Link Network Mirror Pages

Within Community Sites we look for:

• Blog Post signature spam
• Page content spam

We look for backlink indicators within the ‘Harmful Environment' such as:

• De-indexed domains
• Malicious pages
• Community Errors
• Community Warnings
• Non-indexed domains
• Spam TLD
• HTTP status errors (400,500)
• Weak domain and low domain power
• Use of ‘frames'
• Suspicious follow/nofollow ratio from domain

We look at manipulative backlinks:

• Money anchor text
• Link Directory
• High link density from referring page
• High link density from paragraph
• Site-wide link
• Guest post link

We look at relevance of source domain:

• Irrelevant Geo
• Irrelevant domain theme

And then finally into complementary assets and code compliance standards

• No CSS & JS
• Poor or confusing layout (usually deliberate)
• Poor or confusing Navigation (usually deliberate)
• Long domain name
• Domain name numerals
• Suspicious external links
• Suspicious follow links

Further Backlink Analytics

A backlink audit (being a full discovery process) also keeps track of new and lost backlinks to a particular website, so you are always aware of changes in your portfolio.  In the same stride, we also measure all domains' power (trust and authority score), and obtain comprehensive information on all referring domains, anchor texts and IP distribution. We also conduct deep link analysis and monitor and explore the link building activity of your competitors. This way we can easily set targeted goals for your own campaigns.

Because of the Penguin algorithm, the quality of your backlink portfolio really does matter. Backlink Analytics analyzes the full nature and scope of inbound links. This provides a much deeper insight to properly evaluate how these links may affect a website’s SEO. This alone is the only sure way to protect your website from potential penalties.

Also, as much as toxic links can negatively affect your SERP rankings, good quality, editorial links from sites with high trust and authority can improve your search engine rankings.    So it is only through a backlink audit that you can really see and understand just what your profile is doing for you – positive or negative.