1. Savvy business owners and web masters know that backlink analysis remains the single most crucial tool
in their belt for assessing the overall health of their search engine optimization efforts. Backlinks drive
traffic, influence page rankings, and play an outsized role in determining where your pages rank for the
keywords you’ve targeted.
When your business growth stagnates due to a dearth of fresh visitors, backlink analysis is the answer.
When you can’t get attention from major players in your industry because your page ranking is so low as
to harm their SEO if they did so, backlink analysis is the answer.
In short, backlink analysis is vital for pursuing any goal with your website. But knowing that and
knowing how to conduct a comprehensive, effective audit of your backlinks are two separate matters.
Fortunately, SEO experts have researched, tested, experimented, and tweaked until they have such
analysis down to a science: easily shared, comprehended, and applied. All you need is a crash course and
the right tools at hand:
Core Elements of Backlink Analysis
These aspects of backlink analysis have changed little over the years, even as search engines have
become savvier and more sophisticated in how they account for them. You can also expect these factors
to remain as relevant in years to come as they are now.
External links. These are links to a domain other than the one the link exists on; that’s to say, links
from one website to another. These are the most important links you can receive, and thus the most
important to keep track of—arguably, this is the single most important component of your SEO
strategy.
Broken links. These are links that dead­end, due to mistakes, the removal of the target from the
web, or any other number of reasons. These harm your site’s functionality and may impact search
engine ratings. If you’re auditing someone else’s site, these may present an opportunity—you can
suggest a new link target on your own site and gain an external link.
Number of domains. Another important metric, arguably more important in some ways than raw
external links: this is the total number of domains out there linking to your site. Since repeat links
are less valuable than links from different domains, you want to pay close attention to his one.
Linking domains vs. total links. Too many links from a particular domain or group of domains can
actually have a detrimental effect, as it creates an unnatural link portfolio which search engines
take note of. The closer you can get the ratio on this metric, the better.
Fresh incoming links. These are links only recently made or discovered—an important figure for
several reasons. You can see how your strategies are coming along, whether changes to Google
have changed the nature of the links you’re getting, or perhaps most importantly, spot suspicious
activity. A sudden unnatural spike from an unknown or bad domain might be evidence of a
negative campaign from an unscrupulous competitor, meant to taint your rankings.
Link quality and relevancy. This is largely a manually tracked metric. If your links come from high
quality, highly relevant sources then you’re in business. If they’re coming from blatant link farms,
wholly unrelated websites, and other questionable sources, then they can in fact have a deleterious
effect on results. Becoming part of a ‘bad neighborhood’ should also be a concern—links from
sites closely associated with bad content, black hat methods, or industries of dubious legitimacy all
hurt you.
Anchor Text Analysis
We’ve covered the basics of where your links come from, but let’s speak for a moment about Anchor

2. Text: that’s to say, the text that’s associated with the link, the text that visitors click and search engine
bots follow. Optimizing your anchor text has long been a vital part of SEO, but recent changeups in the
way Google and others treat over­optimized anchor link profiles have greatly changed the way SEO
experts view anchor text.
If you’re aiming to rank for the keyword phrase “Lose weight quickly”, it’s now considered ‘unnatural’ if
an overwhelming majority of your backlinks use that exact phrase for anchor text. Instead, natural link
profiles now include ‘tangential’ keyword phrases, universal links such as ‘click here’ and ‘here’, and
other naturalized phrasing. When you look at your backlinks, be on the lookout for signs of over­
optimization.
Here are four concepts to keep in mind for moving forward with modern anchor text:
Naked anchors. This is unmodified anchor text that displays the actual destination URL. These will
make up the majority of your anchor text in a healthy modern portfolio.
Brand anchor. Contain the brand name of your site—Google even perceives differences in
capitalization for these, for the purposes of building natural portfolios.
Hybrid anchors. The new healthy way to get your keywords in, these are longer anchor texts
including a variation on your brand and your keyword phrases OR some related phrase.
Universal/junk anchors. Those “click here” and “visit this website” links used to be anathema to
good anchor link management, but now they serve a vital role in keeping your link portfolio
natural. Use these to dilute oversaturated keyword phrases quickly and easily.
Step by Step Backlink Analysis
You know the language and what to look for, now let’s talk about how to do it. Instead of focusing on the
specifics of a particular tool, we’re going to discuss the general steps any webmaster or business owner
should take to analyze their backlink portfolio. If at any point you find yourself lost in your tool or
unsure how to continue, check your documentation.
Select a tool. Choosing the tool you want to use for backlink analysis can be difficult, but only due to the
relative similarity between any two respectable options. Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, and the other host of
options all offer rougly the same tools in roughly the same format. Your best bet for determining a
favorite will be experimentation: Try a few, and decide which one you like. It’s really that simple.
Explore. Once you have your tool determined, it’s simple enough to get started. Depending on the tool
and your goals you be starting with your domain, your home page, or a particular landing page.
Whichever you’re going with, just copy­paste it into the window and start exploring.
Consider total links, domains, broken links, anchor text, etc. It should be simple enough to find these
metrics regardless of your choice of tool. Investigate the core metrics for your site in general before you
start analyzing individual pages. Why? Because bad SEO and negative campaigns impacting your entire
domain will wholly undo the work you complete on a specific high­quality page.
Drill down to specifics. Once you’ve analyzed your domain’s general health, it’s time to investigate
pages. Depending on the tool you may need to manually enter the page url or you may be able to drill
down to noteworthy pages. Pay very close attention to landing pages and your home page—others don’t
matter nearly as much.
Manually investigate sources. Backlink analysis isn’t complete until you look into all those domains
pointing their links at you. Even if you think you recognize the url, take a closer look—few websites
offer more negative link juice than a knockoff can generate. So investigate, investigate, investigate. If

3. you really want to get down in the dirt on your backlink sources, pop them into your tool and investigate
them that way—after all, any ‘juice’, positive or negative, is getting passed in part to you. So their health
is your health.
Export data to data management software of choice. Any respectable backlink analysis tool will export
to excel and perhaps a few other data management formats. Take advantage of this—the spotlight on a
single point in time generated by an analysis tool is useful, but a timeline showing shifts and changes is
priceless. Especially if another Google update comes out and upsets the natural balance—the faster you
can figure out what’s kosher and what’s not, the more likely you are to assume a dominant position in the
search rankings moving forward.
Clean Up. Once you analyze, it’s time to act. Fixing a flawed backlink portfolio can be a monumental
task, but so long as you stick with it and take each challenge on in steps it shouldn’t be overwhelming.
Your immediate concern should be negative link juice—whether bad choices, unfortunate fans, or
unscrupulous negative campaigns are to blame, you want to cull negative links as quickly as possible.
You can do so by politely asking the webmaster to remove or alter their links to you, asking the actual
webhost to do so, or submitting a disavowal request via search engine webmaster tools. Past that,
developing a natural profile is a matter of time, effort, and research.