5 Steps to Finding & Monitoring Bad Backlinks
Backlinks can be wonderful things if they come from relevant, trustworthy sources. However, links leading back to your site can do more harm than good if they’re unreliable, overly optimized, associated with spam, or no longer active. Keep Google and your intended audience happy by taking the following five steps to discover and monitor bad backlinks, brought to you by the experts at Saba SEO, a trusted digital marketing and web design company in San Diego.
1. Collect Backlink Data
Before you do anything else, you’ll need to know the status of your current backlinks. SE Ranking, Backlink Watch, and Ahrefs are just some of the tools you can use to get the data you’ll need to evaluate and monitor incoming links.
2. Get Backlink Anchor Text Details
The visible, clickable text other websites use to link to your website is what helps search engines identify relevant keywords that also relate to your site. Therefore, an easy way to discover and monitor bad backlinks is to see what anchor text other sites are using to steer traffic to your site. Moz’s Link Explorer is a tool you can use for this purpose.
3. Check Anchor Text Keyword Volume
Keywords related to backlink anchor text usually don’t have a fairly high search volume. Use your preferred keyword tool to check anchor text volumes, but remember to remove extraneous anchor text, such as instances when another site simply uses your site’s URL to link back to it. Once you get your results, pay attention to anchor text with unusually high volumes, since this is a common sign of anchor text manipulation.
4. Create a Spreadsheet of Suspicious Backlinks
Merge your backlink and keyword data, then put this information in a spreadsheet and remove any duplicates. Add a column so you can assess the quality of each backlink. If you don’t have a huge volume of questionable backlinks, simply use a backlink checker tool to manually check each one that’s suspicious. Some of these tools, such as Backlink Checker, conveniently break down results by rank, nofollow detection, and other factors.
5. Make a Backlink List and Update It Regularly
Once you’ve identified and removed or disallowed questionable, broken, or irrelevant links, keep an updated list of all links currently pointing back to your site. Moz’s Link Explorer has a Link List feature you can use to do this.
Whether you need a search engine optimization specialist or a web design expert, call on Saba SEO. As a premier SEO company in San Diego, we have more than a decade of experience in website development and search engine marketing. We can create a responsive, mobile-friendly website for your business and provide high-quality content that is sure to boost your online ranking. Give us a call at 858-277-1717.