Why do you need to track them regularly and manage the quality of your backlinks?
Backlinks are the most useful asset in your link building strategy. However, it’s important to manage and track them regularly to maintain a credible backlink profile.
This article will discuss the top strategies for effective backlinks management and maximizing its impact on your website’s SEO performance.
What Is The Need For Backlink Management?
In the past, having lots of links pointing to your website was enough to get it to show up higher in search results. However, search engines like Google have gotten smarter. Now, they care more about the quality of the links than just the quantity.
While high-quality backlinks or inbound links may initially benefit your site and align well with its objectives, their effectiveness can diminish over time.
Factors like changes in the linking website’s content, its authority, or even Google’s algorithm updates could affect how valuable that backlink is to your site.
Google ranking signals.
If the websites linking to yours are spammy or suspicious, Google might think you’re trying to trick its search system. This could lead to your site getting penalized.
So, it’s important not to build links from low-quality or unreliable sites to avoid problems with your website’s ranking.
The four main reasons to manage your backlink profile are:
Reasons to manage your backlink profile.
- Remove any low-quality backlinks from your site.
- Avoid Google Penalties.
- Avoid getting de-indexed due to lost or broken backlinks.
- Maintaining a healthy link profile.
Benefits of Link Profile Management
Managing your backlink profile—keeping track of the links pointing to your website—has some key benefits:
Maintain Reputation
By eliminating links with bad link quality and other irrelevant links, you can build your website’s credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of both users and search engines. This can lead to increased confidence among visitors and a better reputation online.
Prevention of De-Indexing
Broken or dead backlinks can result in removal from search engine indexes. Regularly monitoring and fixing such backlinks is essential to ensure your website remains accessible and indexed by search engines, preserving its visibility and relevance.
Benefits of backlink management.
Optimized SEO Performance
A well-managed backlink profile contributes to better search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant sources can boost your website’s rankings in search results, driving more organic traffic and improving overall visibility online.
Long-Term Stability
Consistently managing your backlink profile ensures the long-term stability and success of your website.
By actively monitoring and adjusting your link strategy as needed, you can adapt to changes in search engine algorithms and industry trends and maintain steady traffic and engagement levels over time.
Top Tips And Tricks To Manage Backlinks
Here are some strategies to not miss out on if you want to keep your backlink profile clean and sustainable.
Optimize Your Link Building Campaign
To be able to manage your backlinks, you should first focus on collecting links. The more number of backlinks you have, the less it’ll affect your profile to filter out the low-quality ones.
Creating a link building campaign.
When you’re relatively new and building links in the digital space, I strongly recommend you steer away from the temptation of overnight link building strategies that do more harm than good. No matter how long they take, white-hat link building tactics are the way to go.
Backlink management involves filtering out harmful links, and black-hat link building will only give you low-quality backlinks, which you should ideally filter out to protect your site’s reputation.
Check Your Spam Score
Moz has developed a metric called Spam Score to check the health of your backlinks based on Google’s crawlers. Essentially, spam score measures the trustworthiness of a site.
Here’s how you can easily pinpoint a spammy link:
- Comes from websites with little credibility.
- A sudden spike in visitors from countries not in your usual target demographic.
- Has poor-quality guest articles.
- Bot like comments on blogs.
- Lack of link diversification.
Use the Moz Link Explorer tool to check the spam score of your backlinks.
Enter your URL in the box to find data about your spam score.
Having a few backlinks with a high spam score isn’t a big deal. But if you start getting a lot of backlinks from sketchy websites, your website’s spam score could go up, which will affect your site’s SEO performance as well.
Tip: Maintain your spam score between 1-30% and remember to keep it as low as possible to avoid getting noticed by Google.
Monitor Backlinks
As mentioned earlier, a once good link can become non-functional.
Sometimes, a good link can turn worthless if the page it’s coming from no longer exists (like a 404 page) or if the website owner decides to take the link down. Either way, you won’t be notified about it.
You can use Ahref’s broken link checker tool to quickly and easily identify any dead links on your website.
When entering domain details, you’ll be instantly given a list of broken links related to the domain.
If you find a link on your website that’s no longer active; you should try to get it back. Here’s how you can do it:
- Look for broken links on your site.
- Contact the website owner, inform them about the broken link on their site, and offer them a replacement link.
- Once you’ve got your link back, check to make sure the page that’s linking to you is working properly again.
Tip: Always monitor your link velocity. It should always maintain a steady, gradual increase rather than a sudden increase.
Set Alerts for Broken Links
Losing a hard-earned backlink from a high authority site can hurt your ranking.
Since there’s no way of generally knowing when your link becomes non-functional, it’s always better to use the tools available to set up alerts for your site’s lost backlinks. This way, you can keep an eye on your backlinks and track any lost links you want to get back.
The Ahrefs Alerts Tool can notify you when you gain or lose a backlink. This tool notifies you right away so you can check on your backlinks often. By always watching your links, you can keep your link profile in good shape.
Competitor Backlink Analysis
Another way to find link building opportunities is by checking out what competitor websites similar to yours are doing, or, in short, competitive analysis. You can do this by going through their list of backlinks, just like you would with your own website.
You may find some ideas that really worked for them. Maybe they got a lot of attention by sharing an infographic, writing a detailed guide, or something else entirely.
Using Google Alerts can help notify you about any new potential link building opportunities. It lets you know when websites mention your competitors and compares them to your brand mentions.
- Head over to google.com/alerts and type in the keywords you’re interested in tracking.
- Click on “Show Options” under the search bar to customize the alerts you’ll receive.
- You can tweak how often you receive alerts from Google and specify the types of sources you want alerts from. This could include mentions on blogs, news articles, or other online content.
- Pick the language and region from which the content will be presented.
- Lastly, choose the email address where you want to receive these notifications.
Tracking DoFollow And NoFollow Links
When it comes to the links directing back to your website, there are two main types: Dofollow links and Nofollow links. The balance between these two types of backlinks can really impact how Google views your SEO strategy.
Nofollow and dofollow links.
You want to track which of your links are dofollow and nofollow because nofollow links will not contribute to your SEO success. Google crawlers do not acknowledge these links, and although they are accessible to the user, they will not pass on link juice or link equity to search engines.
When you’re managing your backlinks, it’s a good idea to check the balance between your dofollow links and nofollow links. Too many Nofollow links mean you’re missing out on capitalizing on potential SEO benefits.
Disavow Low-Quality Backlinks
Low-quality backlinks can negatively affect your rankings. Hence, if you find links from spammy or irrelevant sites or anchor texts, link farms, directories with little to no editorial oversight, or websites with low domain authority, it’s best to contact the webmaster to get them removed.
If that doesn’t work, then work towards disavowing the links ASAP. Here’s how you can do that:
- Head over to the Google Disavow links tool.
- Write down the links you want to disavow. Make a list with one URL or website address per line and save it as a .txt file.
- Using the tool, upload your list of backlinks and choose which part of your website you want to remove the links from.
- Double-check to make sure the links have been removed as you wanted.
Google pays a lot of attention to how good a backlink is. Knowing this can help you figure out what to do next in your link building efforts. It’s all about understanding your goals and making sure you’re getting the right kind of links to reach them.
SEO Tools For Backlink Management Strategy
Now that you’re familiar with the key things to keep an eye on, here are some useful software tools for managing your backlinks that can make boosting your SEO a breeze, especially during Black Friday when competition is fierce.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a top choice for managing backlinks. It tracks your links, checks out competitors, and helps build new links. You can see how both external and internal links are doing and get insights into their quality and impact on your site’s ranking.
Its user-friendly dashboard makes it simple to analyze your data and find new linking opportunities. It also monitors your competitors’ activities.
With Ahrefs, you get a powerful keyword research tool to find the best keywords for your site. It shows you the search volume and competition for each keyword.
Its automated backlink tracking feature keeps tabs on your backlinks, spotting any issues and tracking your link building progress.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console, a free tool from Google, is widely used for managing backlinks. It gives detailed reports on your website’s performance, including analyzing the quality of backlinks and spotting potential issues in your backlink profile.
With its automated feature, you can track the performance of your current backlinks, explore new link building opportunities, and monitor your campaign’s progress all in one place.
SEMrush
SEMrush helps in backlink management because it is packed with features like link tracking, keyword research, and building. It helps you monitor both internal and external links, giving detailed reports on their quality and impact on your website’s ranking.
Plus, its advanced keyword research tool simplifies finding new keywords with data on search volume and difficulty. With automated backlink tracking, SEMrush keeps you updated on your backlink performance, helps detect issues, and tracks your link building progress.
SE Ranking
SE Ranking’s link management tool helps you check your website’s backlinks. It shows where they come from, what keywords they use, and if they’re of good quality.
Plus, it gives tips on getting good links to boost your site’s authority and rank higher in search results.
Final Thoughts
Effective backlink management is crucial for maintaining a strong online presence and safeguarding your website’s reputation. By regularly monitoring your backlinks, you can remove low-quality links, prevent Google penalties, and ensure your site remains visible in search results.
To achieve long-term success in the ever-evolving digital landscape, prioritize quality over quantity, monitor for spammy links, and stay proactive in addressing broken or inactive backlinks.
FAQs
- Why is it important to manage and track backlinks regularly?
Regular backlink management is essential to ensure the credibility and effectiveness of a website’s link profile. By monitoring backlinks regularly, website owners can identify and address low-quality links that may negatively impact their site’s rankings. - What are the risks associated with having low-quality or spammy backlinks?
Low-quality or spammy backlinks pose several risks to a website’s SEO performance and online reputation. These backlinks can trigger Google penalties, leading to a significant drop in search engine rankings or even de-indexing from search results. - How can backlink management tools help improve a website’s SEO performance?
Link management tools provide comprehensive features and insights to analyze, monitor, and optimize a website’s backlink profile. Tools like these allow users to track the quality and quantity of backlinks, identify low-quality or spammy links, and disavow them to prevent negative impacts on SEO rankings.
