Link building
Review your backlink profile
Examine linking pages, relevance, destinations, and recent changes. Investigate suspicious patterns without assuming that every unfamiliar link is harmful or needs disavowal.
The starting point
Before you begin.
A backlink audit reviews the sites and pages that link to yours. The goal is to understand the context and identify genuine issues or opportunities, rather than react to a single automated score.
The process
How to put it into practice.
- Export available linking-page and referring-domain data from your chosen tool.
- Review samples for relevance, link context, destination, and unusual patterns.
- Document useful relationships and investigate material concerns before recommending action.
Export a sample of links and group them by referring site and destination. Open representative source pages to check whether the link and context are relevant. Document links that deserve attention, broken destinations, and useful relationships; investigate before recommending removal or disavowal.
A practical example
What this could look like.
A local chamber listing and an unrelated automated directory should be evaluated in their own contexts.
Review the work.
Keep the evidence behind your decision: the pages you checked, the date range, the data source, and any assumptions. If you make a change, record what changed and check it again using the same method where possible.
Search visibility can move for many reasons, so compare relevant periods and avoid attributing an inquiry or ranking change to one action without supporting evidence.
What to keep in mind.
Do not disavow links solely because a third-party tool marks them as suspicious.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions.
Does every unfamiliar link need to be removed?
No. Unfamiliar or low-quality links are not automatically harmful. Investigate the context and consult Google’s guidance before using the disavow tool.
Why do backlink tools show different counts?
Tools discover different parts of the web and update on different schedules. Their reports are samples, not complete inventories.
What to do next.
Choose one relevant page or question, document what you find, and agree on the next action before expanding the work. Review the result using the data available to your business.
For the fundamentals, read what SEO is and how it works. If you need hands-on help, explore my SEO services.