Bad backlinks can affect your incoming traffic volume. If the links to your site on other web pages don’t connect properly, you’ll lose out on numerous visitors who may click on those links. Luckily, there are tools available that make the process of finding bad backlinks easier.
Although some of these tools and indexes are used, some of them are quite basic in their functionality. On the other hand, it isn’t feasible to comb the entire internet for every single link to your site and check them individually.
The easiest way to find bad backlinks is to use a link explorer (like Rank Signals or cognitiveSEO) and a spreadsheet, such as Excel or Google Sheets.
What are a bad backlinks?
There are several factors that constitute a bad backlink. All of them refer to links that are either risky (Google may flag the link as manipulative) or ones that affect traffic coming to your website. Search engine optimisers look at three components to determine a bad backlink:
- Trust metrics – SEOs will look at a number of metrics that identify bad backlinks, including spam and trust. These metrics determine how likely the source domain is to be penalised or banned by Google for creating spam, or how trustworthy the domain is based on the quality of other links pointing to it. Ultimately, these metrics determine which websites are trustworthy and which are not, and which ones have links to your website on their pages.
- Anchor text manipulation – Using good anchor text can help improve your rankings, however, over-optimisation can result in penalties from Google. Anchor text needs to be natural and flow with the rest of the article or piece of content. Anchor text that is stuffed with keywords or unnatural will be flagged. There are tools that SEOs use to look at anchor text in an automated, at-scale way that gives a better judgement of the text.
- Low authority – Low authority links are those that come from weak sites. They have little-to-no internal links. If a high authority domain (or website) contains low authority pages, it can be a spam flag for Google and SEOs.
How to perform a backlink analysis
The first step is to gather your backlink data from the backlink explorer. Put your website URL or specific page URL in the search bar and the software will generate an index of backlinks to your site. You can play around with filters in certain software that will eliminate no-follow links or deleted links.
Next, download or save the index. Here you will be able to see spam links and low authority pages that link to your site. Often this is good enough for a webmaster’s purpose of finding bad backlinks. However, you can take it a step further by looking at anchor text manipulation.
Some backlink explorers will have an option to search anchor texts and keywords to measure their value. You will be able to find those that appear to have been manipulated by being stuffed with keywords. You could even put the suspected anchor text into a keyword explorer and see if it has been manipulated at all by looking at irregularly high search volumes.
The next step is to open your saved or downloaded index in a spreadsheet. Delete all duplicated domain links or anchor text from the same webpage. To do this, follow these steps:
- Copy the list of URLs to a new column. Select the Data tab, click on ‘Text to Columns’, then select ‘Delimited’, click ‘Other’ and insert a slash (/). This will split the URLs into two separate columns wherever a slash occurs.
- Next, remove the duplicated domain-anchor texts (those URLs with the same anchor texts). Note that a URL may have multiple of the same links but with different anchor texts each time. That is why we are specifically looking at anchor text duplicates on the same URL.
- To do this, click the Data tab and select ‘Remove Duplicates’. Then, select the column for anchor text and the column for domains, and remove the duplicates. You are now left with the links to analyse.
- Look for links that come from comment spam or paid links. These are usually low-quality links with risky anchor text.
Building a link list
Once you’ve analyse your backlinks and identified the worst ones, the next task is to build a new link list. Some software comes with built-in link list features that allow you to track the live links pointing to your website.
Your new link list can be used to monitor the status of your backlinks once the spam links have been identified and removed. This list will track metrics and tell you what links are live and which ones have been removed. Add your URL to a new link list and paste the remaining links into the designated field.
This is good for ongoing maintenance and review of your backlinks – it will save you time when it comes to performing the process again as you will already have a long list of backlinks to analyse.
When performing a backlink check, it is easier to hire a professional SEO who can provide you with more insight and strategise the best way forward. However, if budget is an issue, you can do a basic backlink check yourself to identify risky links pointing at your site.
If you wish to partner with someone who knows how to apply the best practices to achieve your online goals, don’t hesitate to email us at zani@mobimeme.com.
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