A backlink audit is the process of reviewing the websites and pages that link to your site to find helpful links, risky links, and gaps in your link profile. The goal is to protect rankings, improve trust signals, and decide which links to keep, monitor, remove, or disavow.
Why a backlink audit matters
Backlinks can support search visibility when they come from relevant, trustworthy pages. They can also create problems when they come from spam networks, hacked sites, irrelevant directories, or pages built only to manipulate rankings. A backlink audit helps you spot patterns that may weaken performance, trigger manual actions, or make your link profile look unnatural.
For beginners and growing teams, this process is also useful for understanding what “good” links look like. You can compare links that send referral traffic, mention your brand naturally, and appear on real websites against links with exact-match anchor text, low-quality content, and no clear editorial reason to exist.
How to do a backlink audit
1. Export your backlink data
Pull links from Google Search Console and, if available, one or more SEO tools. Combine the exports in one spreadsheet and remove duplicates. Include linking URL, linking domain, target page, anchor text, and follow or nofollow status.
2. Review quality and relevance
Check whether the linking site is topically related to your business, has real content, and appears maintained. Ask simple questions: Would a real person click this link? Does the page exist for users, or only for search engines? Is the anchor text natural?
3. Flag risky links
Common warning signs include sitewide footer links, foreign-language sites unrelated to your market, spun content, link farms, and repeated exact-match anchors pointing to commercial pages. Flag these for deeper review rather than removing everything that looks weak.
4. Take action
Keep strong links, monitor questionable ones, request removal for clearly harmful links when practical, and use a disavow file only when you have a solid reason. Document each decision so your team can repeat the process later.
Practical example
A local software company audits links to its pricing page and finds 120 new backlinks. Twenty come from relevant SaaS blogs that mention a product comparison article. Those are worth keeping and may even suggest future partnership opportunities. Another 65 come from thin directory pages with identical anchor text like “best CRM software.” The team flags them as risky, attempts removals for the worst offenders, and adds a small set to a disavow file after review. The result is a cleaner link profile and a clearer picture of which content naturally earns links.
What to track after the audit
Monitor referring domains, anchor text trends, manual action status, referral traffic, and rankings for key pages. A backlink audit is not a one-time cleanup. For most sites, reviewing links quarterly is enough, while sites with active link building or a history of spam may need monthly checks.