How do you perform your link audits?
-
What methods and tools do you guys use to perform link audits? Do you also use a traffic light system for links?
-
No problem - if you have any more questions then just drop me an email (my email is on my profile page). Good luck!
-
Excellent, thanks again mate. That's a really big help.
-
No problem, Gareth.
Regarding the distribution of PageRank. I gather a list of all the referring domains to the website in questions, then I lookup the PageRank for these domains (sometimes I use Domain Authority or Citation Flow - depends on your preference). Once I have a list of all the domains and their PR, I create a graph (bar chart) that shows the number of links coming from PR0 domains, PR1 domains, PR2 domains...
This is a nice visual display that you can see the kind of links coming to the site and usually gives a good signal of the quality of links coming through to the domain. Here's an awesome post by Pete Myers that goes through all of this - http://moz.com/blog/link-profiling-with-open-site-explorer
Now, in terms of what indicators I look for with regard to toxicity... I look for the following factors:
- Is the referring domain indexed by Google? If not, then it could be a signal that they have been de-indexed and I would remove this link.
- Is it a sitewide link that is part of a blogroll/footer/sidebar?
- Does the link come from a very low authority domain? (note: this isn't necessarily bad, but you will be able to see if the page has spammy looking content yourself)
- Does the link contain exact match keywords that aren't relevant to the page content at all?
These are the key factors that I look for but once you start analysing your link profile, you will be able to detect a pattern in the links.
Hope this helps
-
Thanks Matthew.
Can you go in to a little detail as to what you mean by distribution of PageRank please? Also, what indicators do you look for in terms of quality and toxicity? Thanks again.
-
For the link audits that I do for my clients, I use a variety of different tools. With link analysis, the more tools the better really. The tools I use are as follows:
- Majestic SEO
- Open Site Explorer
- Ahrefs
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Yandex Webmaster Tools
- Link Detox Tool
I compile all the link information from the first 5 tools mentioned and then import them into Link Detox tool. I can then start manually analysing the links and highlighting any potentially toxic links. Next step is using BuzzStream to find the contact information for the toxic links and then I compile a separate spreadsheet for this. I also put together a graph that shows the distribution of PageRank from external links within Excel - this is a good visual cue for the client.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal no follow links
I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog. Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow. What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?
Technical SEO | | Libra_Photographic0 -
Hreflang tags with link to redirect loop
Hi guys, I'm having a bit of an issue on a client site that I'm hoping someone can help me with. Basically, the client has two domains, one serving users in the Republic of Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com), showing Euro prices, and the other serving users in Northern Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/) showing £ prices. The issue I'm having is that the URL for the Northern Ireland page has a 302 on it and goes through another 2/3 301 redirects until it resolves as http://www.americanholidays.com, however it does then show the £ prices. You can see the redirect chain here: http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11 The homepage is using the Hreflang tag, and pointing search engines to serve the http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/ page to users using EN-GB as their language. The page is also using a self-referencing canonical, which I believe may negate the whole Hreflang tag anyway? My main question is - is the fact that the Hreflang for the gb_en page is pointing to a chain of redirects negatively affecting it? (I understand too many redirects are never good). Also, is the canonical negating the Hreflang? Any help/info would be great as I just can't get my head around it! Thanks guys Daniel
Technical SEO | | DanielKiely60 -
How to fix broken links?
Hi, I use WordPress CMS with Yoast SEO plugin. I have just found out that my 403 errors increased dramatically. It seems that all my tags below of each post are being broken for some reason. When i click on the tags i get the following massage: **403 Forbidden Request forbidden by administrative rules. ** I assume it has something to do with the configuration within Yoast SEO plugin. Dose anyone know how should i fix that? Thanks, Raviv evsGujA
Technical SEO | | Indiatravelz0 -
Too many links in header menu
I'm working on a few clients who are starting to get big header menus. Their site now easily exceeds the 100 links per page recommendation. Normally I would recommend them to cut down on the links, bit in this case these sites have menus that makes navigation easier. I honestly think these menus adds value for the users. The dilemma is that I think the menus provide value from an UX standpoint, but I'm not sure from the SEO standpoint. Any recommendations to this dilemma? Some examples: http://moodsofnorway.com/no/ http://www.gmax.no/ http://www.flust.no/
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Migrating a better performing domain to a less well performing domain
I have a customer who has many domain names and assets but she's wanting to consolidate some of them to help her simplify things for her customers but mostly she wants to build up her website through which she sells products. Grief Reflection - www.griefreflection.com is a personal journal that she's keeping to process the impending death of her husband and it's also linked to her business website which sells healing from grief types of products. Storybooks for Healing - www.storybooksforhealing.com is the website through which she sells workbooks and memory books for people who want to keep the memory of their loved one alive after they've gone. I've setup both of these domains as campaigns and have been looking at the metrics for both. The grief reflection blog out performs the storybooks for healing website. If we merge the two then the Grief Reflection blog would likely become a subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com and be more fully integrated which she thinks will help her visitors not get confused while navigating her website. www.griefreflection.com has 12,637 links while www.storybooksforhealing.com has 1,462. Also, Google has indexed 380 pages of Grief Reflection and only 100 pages for Storybooks for Healing, though that may be because there are fewer pages to index. Grief reflection also has a 4.36 mozRank and 5.30 mozTrust, where Storybooks has 4.13 mozRank and 5.15 mozTrust. Should I counsel her to keep these domains separate? If not, would simply setting up 301 redirects from the www.griefreflection.com domain name to the new subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com be the way to go? Thank you ever so much for any wisdom anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | ChristiMc0 -
Do links count if they have no href parameter?
A SEOmoz report indicates that we have a large number of links on our pages, mainly due to an embedded mega-drop down and lots of product display options that are user activated, but otherwise hidden. Most of the links have the paramter href="#", because the links are used in combination with jQuery to trigger actions. It is still possible to trigger the actions without the href parameter, so the question is: Do links without href parameters count towards the total amount of links on the page, since a link without a href parameter is actually an internal page link? Our site (this version of the site has not had empty tags removed): http://emilea.be/
Technical SEO | | Webxtrakt0 -
Adding no follow links on my site
I am getting a warning about having too many links on my page www.accessoriesonline.co.uk (152) but I don't want to remove any links from the site. Its an ecommerce site with categories across the top, featured products and then a further category navigation in the footer. Would it be beneficial if I added a rel="nofollow" to the links in the footer as these are duplicates of the one's in the header or would this harm the links in the header and the destination URL's which I definitely want to be crawled? Also, does anyone know if SEOMOZ considers links with a rel=nofollow as an actually link when they calculate their overview? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | gavinhoman0