SEO Self-Assessment Series: Link Profile

Today we're talking about your link profile as part of our SEO self-assessment video series. You can watch any of the eight-part series in any order you want and go at your own pace. We'll show you which tools we use at Workshop Digital when we're assessing client websites.

Today we're talking about analyzing the links that point to your website as part of our eight-part, ongoing SEO self-assessment video series. You can watch all the videos—and we recommend watching them in any order you want and going at your own pace.

So, when we talk about links, we're talking about the authority, credibility, and trustworthiness of your site, as measured by other websites that link to your website. In the search engines eyes, these are more or less votes for your site's credibility, authority, and popularity. Although they don't use those words—they use words like trustworthiness and authority and expertise so they can understand which sites are gathering more links or citations from other websites and how to value those and understand which sites are actually the most popular, relevant, or credible so they can return those sites higher up in their organic search results.

When you're analyzing your site, and the links pointing to your site, we call that a link profile or a backlink profile. There a lot of tools we can use at Workshop Digital to analyze all the links that you've gained to your website, links you’ve lost to your website, links that are going to your competitor sites that you haven't yet gained—and find those opportunities to improve your website's credibility or trustworthiness or expertise.

Some of the tools that we use, and that we're going to share with you in this video, are Google Search Console. We've shown this in other videos. Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that shares a wealth of information with you once you verify ownership of your site. One of the most important reports that you can get directly from Google is the links that they have counted, or they attribute, to your website. In this report, you're going to be able to see the links to pages that point to your website, as well as the domains that are pointing to your site, and the internal links on your own site that point from your own page to a different page on your domain. These are all valuable in their own right, but they're going to allow you to start to see where the best things are coming from—and where you might want to actually disavow or take out some of the links from Google's consideration if they weren't legitimately gained, or if there are links that you feel like could hurt your chances of ranking better.

Google Search Console is definitely a good starting point for us as we analyze websites when we can get access to that information. From there, we can go into third party research tools. Ahrefs is a backlink auditing service, or a backlink aggregation service, that crawls millions upon millions of websites and finds all the links and categorizes them, so that we can then go in and analyze—and figure out on a page by page basis—which pages or pieces of content are gaining links or losing links. As we dig through these reports, we can start to look at links and how they change over time: links that are coming from different types of domains, such as educational links or government links; or links that point to an old URL that has been redirected to a new URL. All of these are important to understand how your site's performing and where you can find opportunities to increase the links pointing to your current website and your existing content.

SEMrush is another tool that does a great job visualizing link information and your link profile. For any domain that we're analyzing, we can audit or inspect their links and quickly and easily decipher which links are important, which ones are valuable, which ones are not as valuable—and then how to go out and find more links that that meet that criteria.

And finally, Moz—formerly SEO Moz—has a link crawling tool called Link Explorer. And this is another go to resource for us in the SEO industry. They have a free trial [and] they have a paid version—all of these tools have the same type of “freemium” model—but it allows us to again use different data points to triangulate which links matter to your site and which ones don't matter as much—so we can focus on getting the higher quality links.