What is a Website Link Audit?
To perform a website link audit, you should begin by visiting Google Search Console and exporting all links from there. You can export each link individually or use the “convert text to column” feature under the “Who Links the Most” section to separate each link by the date it was discovered. Once you have exported your links, you can create a spreadsheet to keep track of them and conduct a link audit on them.
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Sitewide links aren’t always “bad”
Sitewide links are often considered spam by some SEO experts, but they aren’t always “bad” for search engine rankings. Depending on how they’re used, sitewide links can be beneficial, including those that go to unrelated websites or use keyword-rich anchor text. These links are typically not permitted unless a site pays for them, and Google takes action against sites that abuse this tactic.
One example of sitewide links is when a freelance website designer builds a website for a client in a different niche and places a link to the client’s site in the footer. Sitewide links are a great way to connect two websites, but they must be related to the topic. For example, a sports car publication should never link to a cat-care website. This practice can lead to penalties for both sites.
Using a tool to conduct a website link audit
Using a link audit tool is an excellent way to check your website for broken links. If you’re adding links to your website regularly, you should check if they’re working properly and performing well. It’s important to fix broken links to provide your users with a positive user experience. However, you shouldn’t rely on a tool alone to find and fix broken links.
One tool that can help you with your website link audit is Semrush. This is a powerful tool that analyzes backlinks and identifies high-quality and low-quality ones. The tool can also be used to identify new opportunities to create high-quality backlinks and improve your overall link-building strategy.
Finding the best and worst referring sites
The Referring domains report shows the sites that link to your website. You can add a dofollow filter to identify the best and worst referring sites, and sort the results by Domain Rating (DR) from low to high. Low DR sites will be at the bottom of the list, but that doesn’t mean they are bad. Low DR just means that the site doesn’t have many links to it, or those links are not as strong as they could be.
As with any website link audit, it’s important to analyze all backlinks. While some of the links may be spammy, others are of great value. For example, a backlink from an Indian website with high traffic can boost your rankings there. Similarly, if your site is targeting English-speaking countries, you’d expect to see referring domains from country-specific and general domains.