With Google focusing more and more on cleaning up back links, or links pointing to your site from other websites, it’s important to do a link audit of your site and make sure you won’t be hit with a penalty. In this article I’ll walk you through a 15 minute backlink checking process. This process is ideal for small companies without a budget for SEO/SEM expert analysis. If you want to go straight to the link building tips to improve your website's PageRank skip to the bottom.
To get started, go to majesticseo.com and register for a free account. You can google “link checker” and find other tools, there are many to choose from. Right now, I like Majestic SEO because it’s free and they give you a lot for creating an account. Once you log into Majestic SEO, verify you own the domain your checking so you can generate the backlink report. Do this by clicking on “Tools > Webmaster Tools” and follow the prompts to verify ownership or admin rights to the domain whose links you’d like to check. After you’ve done this, click on the “Tools > Site Explorer” link in the primary navigation. On the page that appears, enter the domain you wish to check. Within a short time, you’ll see a page like this:
There is a nice video explaining all the tools and features. For now, click on the “Backlinks” tab.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Download data”. Choose Excel or CSV and import the spreadsheet into your favorite application.
What are you looking for?
1. Look for links that might get you in trouble with Google:
- Links that aren’t indexed by Google
- If you see a suspicious looking link, type site:domainlinkhere into a Google search field
- If the site isn’t indexed, you’ll see a message the domain you entered don’t match any documents
- Check the link by clicking on it
- If you see any malware or error warnings, mark this back link as suspicious
- Links pointing to your site that appear alongside links to spam, porn pills, unrelated links
- If you find that the link pointing to your site has other links to unrelated sites or sites that are spammy, mark this back link as suspicious
- Paid links with exact match keywords
- Don’t take any chances, remove these links now
- For example, “Best SEO company San Francisco"
- Have a good mix of different kinds of back links:
- Brand links - yourDomain.com (no more than 40% of your inbound links)
- Exact-match anchor text keyword links - these should point to the relevant page to the keyword (no more than 50%)
- Partial-match keyword link text
- Generic links like “click here” or “read more”
- Page title links
To improve your chances of the webmaster removing the link, use a "polite request for help" tone along with the details of the page's URL where the link is located, the URL of the page on your site that is being linked to, and the anchor text of the link.
You could also add a message that if they don't remove the link, you'll have to use Google's "Disavow Links" tool. Letting them know you're concern is that Google may flag their site and send them a penalty for not being in compliance.
What's next? Why not boost your PageRank the natural way?
2. Look for natural and useful link building opportunities:
- Put links on sites you own
- Blog
- Social media (even if they’re nofollow, traffic could lead to conversions)
- Friends and family’s sites
- Google+ (at the time of writing this article, these are follow links passing juice)
- Twitter (follow links) Profile pages
- Submit your site to ubl.org
- This service will take your key worded links and submit them to search sites, mobile services, and social networks in a natural manner
- High Authority sites
- Do you best to get a link placed on an .edu or .gov website that is relevant to yours (or two, or three…)
- Newspaper sites are also great for improving your PageRank
Do you have an opinion or question on this? Please leave us your comment below.
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