Backlink Audit
A backlink audit is a review of every external link pointing to your site. Its purpose is twofold: to identify links that may be harming your rankings or putting you at risk of a Google penalty, and to understand the current state of your link profile so you can direct future link building efforts more effectively.
Most sites do not need to audit their backlinks urgently. If you have not engaged in manipulative link building and have not seen a sudden unexplained traffic drop, your link profile is probably not the issue. But if you have bought links in the past, inherited a site with a questionable history, experienced a ranking drop after a Google core update, or suspect a negative SEO attack, a thorough audit is the right starting point.
Start with Google Search Console
Before opening any third-party tool, check Google Search Console under Security and Manual Actions. A manual action means Google has sent a human reviewer to assess your site and concluded it violates their spam policies - usually due to unnatural links. If you have a manual action, resolving it is your first priority. No other SEO work will move the needle until it is cleared.
If no manual action is present, the next step is the Links report in Search Console, which shows your top linking sites and top linked pages. This gives you a baseline view of your link profile using Google's own data.
Pulling the full link profile
Google Search Console does not show every backlink. For a complete picture, use Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz - each crawls the web independently and returns their own index of linking pages. For the most comprehensive view, run the audit in at least two tools and combine the results, as each platform's index differs.
Export the full referring domain list. You are auditing at the domain level, not the individual URL level - a site that has placed 50 links to you across different pages is one referring domain with one decision to make, not 50 separate assessments.
What to look for - and what not to panic about
Third-party tools assign toxicity scores to links, and these scores generate a lot of unnecessary anxiety. A low DR score, a foreign-language domain, or a site outside your niche does not automatically mean a harmful link. Google is sophisticated enough to discount links it considers low quality without penalising you for them. As OutreachFrog's analysis puts it: "toxic backlinks are not every red row in a report - they are the parts of your profile that tell a story of shortcuts and schemes instead of relevance and expertise."
The links genuinely worth investigating are those that fit recognisable manipulative patterns:
- Links from private blog networks - sites that exist only to sell links, with no real editorial content or audience
- Links from link farms or directories with hundreds of outbound links to unrelated sites
- A sudden spike of links from unrelated sites in a short period, which may indicate a negative SEO attack
- Over-optimised anchor text patterns - dozens of links using your exact target keyword as anchor text, which signals an unnatural link building campaign
- Links from hacked or malware-infected sites
Removing and disavowing links
When you identify links that are clearly manipulative, the first step is to try to have them removed. Contact the site owner, request removal, and document the attempt. Keep records of all outreach including dates and responses.
For links you cannot remove - either because the site owner does not respond or because the site appears abandoned - use Google's Disavow Tool. This is a plain text file submitted through Google Search Console that tells Google to ignore specific URLs or entire domains when assessing your link profile. The format is simple: one URL or domain per line, with domain-level disavows prefixed with domain:.
A case study from Adeptus SEO illustrates the process: after submitting a disavow file for 937 toxic links from low-DR spam sites and expired directories, Google Search Console showed those links removed from consideration within two weeks, and keyword rankings returned to their expected trajectory. When applied to genuinely harmful links, the process works.
The risk of over-disavowing
The disavow tool is a safety valve, not a routine maintenance task. Disavowing links you legitimately earned - even if they come from low-authority sites - strips away equity that is helping your rankings. Aggressive use of the disavow tool does more damage than leaving low-quality but harmless links in place.
Be conservative. Only disavow links that fit clear manipulative patterns. If you are unsure whether a link is harmful, leave it. Google's algorithms are designed to discount unnatural links algorithmically - the disavow file is for situations where the links are so clearly manipulative that algorithmic discounting may not be sufficient.
Using the audit for link building opportunities
A backlink audit is not only about identifying problems. It also reveals which of your pages attract the most links - showing you what content in your sector earns links and what to create more of. It shows you which referring domains link to competitors but not to you - your highest-probability outreach targets. And it shows gaps in your anchor text distribution, so you can direct future link building toward pages that need more support.
With the link building chapter complete, the next chapter covers content strategy - how to plan, create, and maintain content that earns rankings over time.