Backlink Audits: Bolstering Your Backlink Profile Post March 2024

Strategies for building and maintaining an effective backlink profile have undergone significant changes since Google’s March 2024 Helpful Content Update (HCU). Unfortunately, however, backlink strategies are far from the only things that have changed since that core algorithm and policy update.

Google’s Helpful Content Update and policy refresh on spam links have caused some of the most volatile site ranking fluctuations ever seen, and I was all set to publish our findings based on our clients’ experiences next month. Then, someone at Search leaked Google’s algorithm ranking factors, so look for that blog post in a few weeks, followed a few weeks later by the most up-to-date study on Google’s HCU impact on a cross-section of our clients, a representation that includes almost every industry.

The Impact of the Helpful Content Update on Your Backlinks & Backlink Auditing

Returning to backlinks, the HCU has left many site owners, particularly those who invested heavily in their link-building campaigns, questioning the value and potential risks associated with their existing backlinks and the negative impact they may have had on their website rankings. The only way to know for sure is through a series of SEO site audits.

Google’s March 2024 update redefined what constitutes a valuable backlink and necessitated an immediate backlink audit for everyone who is serious about SEO. After conducting a backlink audit, you must also then ask the following questions:

• Should you focus on removing low-quality links?
• Is the disavow tool necessary?
• How cautious should you be with your link removal strategy?

In this guide, you’ll learn the intricacies of conducting a thorough backlink audit, particularly in the context of recent updates. With over 15 years of experience in building and auditing backlink campaigns, I’m going to walk you through backlink auditing and how to bolster your backlink profile to align it with SEO best practices to support your site’s rank, growth, and domain authority.

A Quick Look Back at Previous Google Updates & Their Impact on Backlinking

Google’s algorithm updates have consistently aimed to improve the quality of search results, targeting practices that manipulate search rankings. Over the years, significant algo updates like Penguin and Panda have reshaped the SEO landscape and significantly impacted SEO and backlinking strategies.

Panda Update

The Panda update, first rolled out in February 2011, aimed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites and reward high-quality sites with better rankings. It evaluated content quality signals such as:

• Thin or duplicated content
• Poor user experience (too many ads, layout issues, etc.)
• Low expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness

Panda penalized sites with large amounts of low-quality content, encouraging a shift towards producing high-quality, original, and valuable content for users. It devalued tactics like keyword stuffing and publishing low-effort pages solely for search engine rankings.

Penguin Update

The Penguin update, launched in April 2012, specifically targeted webspam and manipulative link-building tactics. It aimed to penalize sites for buying links or obtaining them through link schemes and networks violating Google’s guidelines. Penguin evaluated link quality signals like:

• Unnatural inbound links (excessive link exchanges, link farms, etc.)
• Paid links intended to manipulate rankings
• Excessive exact-match anchor text links

It devalued low-quality, spammy, or artificial links in favour of natural editorial links earned through quality content and relationships. This forced a shift from aggressive link-building to earning links naturally.

However, the reality is spammy backlinking and content practices, and the websites that practised them continue(d) to flourish, and the March 2024 HCU is no different.

Backlinks and Backlink Auditing in a Post-HCU World

Fast forwarding to March 2024, the Helpful Content Update continues Google’s attempts at its stated goals of elevating content quality and user experience by rewarding websites that offer helpful, people-first content while devaluing those that rely on manipulative SEO practices. Let’s be clear, to Google’s credit, their goals have generally remained the same. The jury’s still out, however, on whether, in practice, the HCU is a step forward or backwards in that direction.

Here’s a Reddit thread discussing the issue quite succinctly: it always seems to be the medium and smaller sites that are devastated.

One thing we can say for sure, in any case, is that the Helpful Content Update made it that more important to practise backlink building with reputable, high-quality sources that genuinely add value to the user experience.

But even if you’ve been doing so all along, you always need the occasional, comprehensive backlink audit to identify which links are still valuable and which ones may be harming your site’s SEO.

How to Start Evaluating Your Backlinks

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to evaluate your backlinks using Ahrefs, one of the most powerful keyword research and backlink audit tools available. Your preferred backlink audit tool’s nomenclature may vary, but the procedure will likely be the same.

Step-by-Step Instructions Using Ahrefs

1. Access Ahrefs Site Explorer
   • Log in to your Ahrefs account and navigate to the Site Explorer tool. Enter your website’s URL to get a comprehensive overview of your backlink profile.
2. Analyze the Overview Report
   • The overview report provides a summary of your backlink profile, including the total number of backlinks, referring domains, organic traffic, and more. Pay attention to the Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR) as indicators of link quality.
3. Review Backlink Distribution
   • Check the distribution of your backlinks by DR and UR. Identify if there is a significant number of links from low DR sites, as these might be potential candidates for removal or disavowal.
4. Examine Referring Domains
   • Navigate to the Referring Domains report to see a list of all domains linking to your site. Focus on the quality of these domains. High-quality, authoritative domains related to the content you are publishing are beneficial, while “link farms” and irrelevant domains are considered spammy and can be harmful.
5. Evaluate Individual Backlinks
   • Use the Backlinks report to examine individual backlinks. Look for patterns that indicate manipulative link-building practices, such as a high number of links with exact match anchor texts or links from low-quality content.
6. Identify Toxic Backlinks
   • Utilize the Ahrefs Backlink Checker tool to identify toxic or potentially harmful backlinks. Look for links from spammy sites, private blog networks (PBNs), or sites with high spam scores.

Once you’ve identified potentially harmful backlinks, you then have to decide whether or not to remove those links and how to do so.

Exercise Caution with Post-Backlink-Audit Link Removals

To help you in your link-removal decisions, it’s always helpful to consider monthly organic traffic (MOT) and avoid these common link building myths. MOT is the number of visitors to a website that get there from a SERP by clicking on one of the links in the search results without clicking on an ad. In a nutshell, you need to make a decision about backlinks with high MOT value because the site gets a lot of traffic. A key consideration to think about is whether the content in which those backlinks are embedded, the keywords, and the hosting sites are all related and answer a user’s search intent.

If you’ve decided, based on content relevancy, traffic, and MOT, to remove a link, it’s still important to proceed with caution:

• Gradual Removal. Removing a large number of backlinks too quickly can negatively impact your Domain Rating (DR). Aim for a gradual and strategic removal process.
• Prioritize High DR Sites. Be particularly careful when removing links from sites with low MOT value but high DR, as these can still influence your DR.

Removing Harmful & Potentially Harmful Backlinks

The best way to remove potentially harmful backlinks to your site is to contact the site owners one at a time and ask them to remove the hyperlink from the content, or have them change the hyperlinks to give them no-follow attributions. This way, they get to keep the content, and you don’t have to worry about dropping in search result rankings or, worse, having all or part of your site delisted from Google search results due to a manual action. 

If you can’t reach a webmaster or are otherwise unable to get a link removed, you can use Google Search Console’s Disavow tool.

Using Google’s Disavow Tool

In most cases, the disavow tool is unnecessary, and it should only be used as a last result. These are the specific criteria for using it:

• Considerable Number of Spammy Links. If your site has accumulated a large number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links. A low number of spam links pointing to your site doesn’t require disavowing them.
• Manual Action Risk. If these links have caused or are likely to cause a manual action from Google.

It’s important to highlight that both conditions must be met for the disavow tool to be appropriate. Using the tool without a clear need can be counterproductive.

If you need to disavow links, you can do so by creating and uploading a .txt file encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII on their disavow links tool page. List one link per line. Each must be the entire link to one page; you can’t disavow an entire subpath. Google will ignore any links that begin with a #; use it for lines containing your personal notes. The maximum URL length is 2,048 characters, the maximum number of lines is 100,000 total, and the maximum file size is 2MB.

Important disavowal considerations:

• Disavowing links is irreversible, so be certain you need to do so for every link before submitting your list.
• Google treats disavow submissions as suggestions, not directives.
• It may take some time (potentially weeks or months) before links are disavowed, and linger to see the effects of disavowing those links.

You can cancel disavowals if they haven’t taken place yet or change your list by uploading a new one on the disavow links tool page.

Tips for Managing Your Backlink Profile

After a backlink audit and removal of potentially harmful links, maintaining a healthy backlink profile requires ongoing attention and maintenance, like pruning a garden. Here are some practical tips for managing your backlinks effectively:

Remove ‘Dead Sites‘

One of the key steps in managing your backlink profile is to remove links from ‘dead sites’—websites that are no longer active or have significantly lost their authority. Use Google Search Console or Ahrefs to identify links from sites with little to no traffic or those that are no longer updated. Then, follow the steps above to remove them.

Focus on Quality over Quantity

Building an effective link building campaign is not about the sheer number of links but about their quality. Here’s a convenient checklist to review before posting content or reaching out to hosts:

1. High-Quality Content
   • Create valuable, relevant, and high-quality content that not only fits the site it’s being posted to, but is informative enough to also naturally attract backlinks from authoritative sites.
2. Relevance and Authority
   • Ensure that the sites linking to you are relevant to your niche and have a high Domain Rating (DR). High-quality backlinks from authoritative sites carry more weight and contribute positively to your SEO.
3. Natural Link Acquisition
   • Don’t engage in manipulative link-building practices. Strive for organic, natural link acquisition through content marketing, guest blogging, and building relationships within your industry.
4. Monitor Link Velocity
   • Sudden spikes in the number of backlinks can indicate manipulative link-building practices.

Building Future Backlinks

As you move forward, adapt your link-building strategy to focus on long-term value by:

1. Building Relationships
   • Foster relationships with industry influencers, bloggers, and authoritative sites. This leads to natural backlink opportunities.
2. Looking for Content Collaboration Opportunities
   • After engaging with others in your industry, look for current events, controversies, unique topics, and common talking points for collaborations, such as co-authored articles, interviews, and industry roundups, to gain high-quality backlinks.
3. Monitor and Adjust
   • Continuously monitor your backlink profile using tools like GSC, Moz, and Ahrefs, and adjust your strategies based on performance and updates in SEO best practices.

These tips will help you maintain a healthy backlink profile that supports your SEO efforts and enhances your site’s authority and ranking. That said, however, if you choose to consult an expert SEO consultant to help with backlinking or a backlink audit, be sure to partner with one that’s honest about timelines and follows best industry practices.

What to Look for in a Professional SEO for Backlink Audits & Linkbuilding Campaigns

If nothing else, the Google March 2024 HCU is another reminder of the importance of doing things right the first time. Any SEO who promises vast improvements to your search engine rankings overnight is either lying to you, plans on spamming the internet with low-quality content with your name on it, or both. Always look for an established, reputable SEO, like one that is an Ahrefs-certified agency that rolls up its sleeves and is ready to do the work. Backlink campaigns and organic SEO, in general, are long-term strategies that can provide incremental improvements over time, contributing to sustainable, lasting domain authority, search rankings, and, ultimately, sales.