Backlink Profile Analysis - Discover Proven Tools and Strategies

A website's link profile (the number and quality of external links pointing to the site) is one of the most critical factors influencing SEO results. But is your site's link profile truly valuable? You can check this - run a link profile analysis using specialized SEO tools. How do you do it?

Inbound links - what are they and how do they affect SEO?

Inbound links are links pointing to your site that originate from external websites. If a user clicks on a link, they will be redirected to your site. Links can be categorized by attributes:

• nofollow - these links do not affect SEO results and do not pass the linking page's authority,
• dofollow - these links influence SEO results and pass authority from the linking domain to the linked one. The more high-quality dofollow links pointing to your site, the greater your site's authority in the eyes of Google bots.

Evaluating a website's link profile - why is it worth it?

What benefits will regular link profile analysis bring you? Thanks to it, you will:

• find new places where it is worth placing links to your website,
• be able to compare your position with competitors,
• find inspiration for your link building activities,
• verify the results of working with an external agency to which you entrusted link building,
• gain new partners for link building collaboration,
• boost SEO results and build site authority.

How to evaluate a website's link profile - first steps

Do you want to evaluate your website's link profile? Pay attention to the following elements:

• relevance - links should be placed on websites and subpages that are related to your business; the link should also be placed in an appropriate context related to the article's topic,
• link placement - links placed in the main content area or in in-content boxes will provide the greatest value;
• domain quality and authority - high-quality links are placed on sites with established authority - they have high traffic and good visibility in Google, as well as a valuable history,
• number of links pointing to the site - remember, however, that a large number of links from low-quality sites can negatively affect your site's SEO,
• link acquisition velocity - links should grow gradually - a sudden spike may indicate that links were bought,
• anchor text content (the clickable text used for links) - should be diverse,
• subpages on your site most frequently linked to - these should be the most important subpages on the website.

The Ahrefs tool for comprehensive link profile analysis

Ahrefs is an SEO tool you can use for a comprehensive analysis of your site in terms of SEO. One of its modules - Site Explorer - focuses on link profile analysis. After entering your website address or a selected subpage, you will see basic data about the link profile. This includes:

• the number and quality of links compared to competitors - via the Ahrefs Rank metric,
• the strength of a given URL's link profile - the UR (URL Rating) metric,
• the strength of the entire domain's link profile on a 100-point scale compared to competing sites (the DR metric - Domain Rating).

Basic website link profile information in Ahrefs, source: ahrefs.com

Based on this, you can see how your website's link profile compares to the competition. However, this is not all the external link data you will find in Ahrefs. What else should you analyze to accurately assess your link building strategy?

• new, lost, and broken links - what links have you gained recently, what links have you lost, and which have been broken, e.g., due to the removal of a given subpage? The tool will inform you about the reason for the link's loss or breakdown, allowing you to contact the site owner to restore the link.
• the link profile strength of the websites referring to your site,
• which subpages on your site have the most referring links,
• how your competitors are building their link profiles - on which sites they place their links,
• what the link growth velocity is - whether the links are growing steadily,
• anchor text content - what link texts are the most popular, is it your brand name, or perhaps a service name?

The Ahrefs tool will generate a list of anchors, which is the clickable text of links pointing to your website.

Backlink analysis in Majestic SEO

Another tool you can use to check your website's link profile quality is Majestic SEO. Like Ahrefs, it evaluates the strength and value of the link profile based on the number and quality of links pointing to the site. The metrics in Majestic SEO are:

• Trust Flow, which assesses the quality of the domain from which the link originates,
• Citation Flow - evaluates the quality of the link - it takes into account the number of backlinks pointing to it.

Both metrics should be at a similar level. A high Citation Flow metric may indicate a large number of links from low-authority sites. In turn, a low Trust Flow metric means that you have few few links leading to the site (perhaps too few), but they are of high quality.In addition to the main metrics, in Majestic SEO you will find information about:

• link types (dofollow, nofollow, text, image, redirect),
• historical links acquired by a site - yours or your competitors',
• other links on a given subpage - their density and the websites they point to,
• links pointing to a specific URL.

Breakdown of links in the Majestic SEO tool

Other tools that allow you to analyze a link profile include:

• Surfer,
• SEMRush,
• Backlink Watch,
• Rank Signals,
• MonitorBacklinks,
• SiteCondition.

Summary

Analyzing a website's link profile is not only a chance for better SEO results, but also an opportunity to find inspiration and grow the links pointing to your site. Regardless of which tool you choose, you will be able to eliminate errors in your link profile and disavow damaged links. All of this without tedious, manual analysis.

Katarzyna Nowak - online marketing specialist at the widoczni.com agency. On a daily basis, she creates content for the company blog, sharing knowledge about digital marketing.