Have a healthy backlink profile
Checking the backlink profile of a client / potential client should be standard practice right now. We are no longer solely focusing on the number of backlinks that are there, but also on the ratio of positive vs. damaging.
Unfortunately, the best way to get this sorted is to use a link removal service (which is lovely if you have the budget for that) or to just tuck in. Set yourself a realistic goal and time frame, because staring at 60,000 backlinks can be a little daunting.
As with most other aspects of SEO, analyzing your backlinks is a multi-step process. The first round of separating the wheat from the chaff should probably focus on the most damaging backlinks by removing pretty much anything that looks like this:
You can quickly identify the worst offenders in this category by running a referring domains report on MajesticSEO.com.
The next step is to look at your anchor text and determining if there are any red flags. Common problems include:
- Over-optimized keyword anchor text
- Irrelevant or misleading anchor text
- Not enough variation on anchor text on multiple backlinks on the same referring domain
It is important to note that if you submitted the disavow file to Google at the end of the first phase of backlink removal then you will want to continue to add domains to that file and resubmit, rather than creating a whole new empty disavow file.
Finally, you want to run a backlink report. On MajesticSEO, this gives you a list of your backlinks (the number you can report on is based on your subscription… if you need more, I would use Google Webmasters Tools for a full report). This will allow you to identify any URLs that you weren’t caught in the first two rounds of backlink clean up that have a low trust flow or are otherwise undesirable.
This can be a huge task to undertake and a lot of people will probably be tempted to skip it entirely, but the fact is that a healthy backlink structure is becoming a key to having a successful SEO campaign.
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