Backlink audits

Backlinks are the part of SEO most business owners never see, which makes them the easiest thing for an agency to fudge. A monthly report that says “12 links built” tells you nothing about whether those links are worth anything, or whether they’re quietly setting you up for a penalty.

What a bad link actually looks like

Private blog networks, guest posts on sites nobody reads, directories that stopped getting traffic around 2011. None of it looks obviously wrong in a spreadsheet — it only becomes a problem once Google notices, and by then it’s your ranking on the line, not the agency’s.

How I actually check every link

Most link audits are one Ahrefs export with the spammiest stuff filtered out. That misses more than it catches, because no single tool sees your whole link profile. So I pull three: Ahrefs, SEMrush and a Search Console export, and cross-reference the lot. Whatever one tool missed usually shows up in another, and by the end there’s nowhere left for a dodgy link to hide.

Once the lists are merged, I strip the obvious junk first, dead links, duplicates, the stuff any half-decent filter would catch on its own. Then it slows right down, because what’s left gets checked one by one, not skimmed.

For every domain still standing, I’m looking at its history (has it always been what it is now, or is it some unrelated expired domain that got flipped and repurposed to sell links), its Domain Rating, whether it’s actually pulling search traffic and where that traffic’s coming from, and what it ranks for. A link from a site Google’s stopped sending anyone to isn’t doing you any favours, no matter what the DR says.

On top of that I map your anchor text distribution across the whole profile, not just whatever’s been built recently. Too many exact-match keyword anchors pointing at the same page is one of the clearest tells Google looks for, and it’s usually invisible until someone actually charts it out. A natural profile leans on brand names, naked URLs and generic phrases like “click here”, with keyword-rich anchors sitting quietly in the background rather than out in front.

It’s slower than exporting a spreadsheet and calling it a day. It’s also the difference between an audit that tells you something you didn’t know, and one that just repeats what a tool already showed you.

What I check

Every link that’s actually contributing to your authority, versus every link that’s just sitting there doing nothing, versus anything that looks paid-for in a way that breaks Google’s guidelines. If there’s real risk, I’ll say so plainly — not everything needs a disavow file, and over-disavowing can do its own damage.

Where to build authority next

An audit that only tells you what’s wrong stops halfway. Once I know what your link profile actually looks like, sat next to two or three competitors who are beating you, the gaps get obvious: which of their link sources are realistically gettable, which topics or pages have real authority behind them and which don’t, and where a metric everyone stresses about isn’t actually what’s holding you back.

You’ll walk away with a short, prioritised list of where new links would actually move the needle, not a vague “get more backlinks” line. What you do with that list is up to you. I’ll point you at the gap, I won’t run the campaign to fill it — that’s still a separate conversation with whoever you choose to run it.

Especially worth it if

A previous agency was cagey about their link-building process, or you inherited a domain with an ambiguous history. Better to know what you’re standing on than find out from a manual action.

Questions people ask