At ParadoxLabs, we’re passionate about sharing our SEO knowledge with our customers and readers. It only makes sense for us to tackle the topic of links. Link building has changed so much since the inception of SEO. If your ecommerce business has been online from the beginning, you probably remember getting tons of spammy emails claiming to get your site “1,000 PR 5 links” and “rank you #1 or your money back!” Even worse, your inbox may still be flooded with these terribly written emails.
The days of automated link building are long gone, well, for most of the good citizens of the web that is. Today, good marketers and business owners are shifting their focus to the practice of link earning. Because the term “link building” doesn’t really define new linking practices, we won’t use it in our posts. Since link earning has evolved so much, and there’s so much to learn, we’ve decided to do a two-part blog series on the topic. For our first post in the link earning series, we’ll focus on the anatomy of a healthy backlink profile.
How To Extract Your Backlink Profile
You know that the practice of linking online has changed drastically, but where do you start? All business owners want great links, because great links still send a lot of trust and authority signals to the search engines. First, you need to figure out where your links are coming from and how many you have. This process isn’t hard if you stay organized.
By now, you should have Google Webmaster Tools enabled on your site. Here, you have access to a lot of information that Google Anayltics doesn’t provide. These two tools work great together, but Webmaster Tools is the place to get good link data. We recommend starting in Webmaster Tools (WMT) because these are the links that Google is indexing. These tend to be the most important links you have because if Google can see them, they’re calculating their worth into your visibility metrics.
Now, WMT may not gather every single link that’s pointing to your site, so keep that in mind. Here, you simply navigate to the “Search Traffic” heading, then choose the “Links to Your Site” subheading. You are given a few different options to look at: “Who links the most” and “Your most linked content.” Both of these options are good, so download all the links you can from each section. After you’ve downloaded the links, simply sort your Excel document by like domains, or any way you prefer. Don’t forget to remove any duplicates in your document, this saves you a lot of time and a potential headache!
As mentioned, WMT isn’t the only source for good link data. You can use numerous tools to scrape the web and pull every link they can find for your site. Most of these tools are paid and will only pull a small set of data for free. If you do a lot of link analysis, we recommend signing up and paying for a tool like Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs. But, if you’re only concerned with your own links and what links Google is looking at, WMT should do the trick.
Link Diversity
After you’ve downloaded as many links as you can from WMT, you’re ready to dive into the actual link analysis. An important metric to look at is the diversity of the domain you’re getting, or have gotten, links from.
Ideally, you want to have lots of links from lots of different domains. This tells the search engines that a lot of different sites and people find your content important enough to share. You run into some trouble when you have 10,000 links from one single domain. In the past, the sheer amount of links you had meant your site appeared higher on the SERPs (search engine results pages.) This is not the case anymore. Today, diversity is much more important than volume.
Furthermore, a large amount of links from one single domain may indicate old, spammy SEO tactics have been used. Usually, a large number of single-domain links came from site-wide footer links, sidebar links, or cloaked links that appeared on every page of a site. Think of it this way: if you have 5,000 links from 3 domains, your ratio is way off (5000/3.) Here, a better ratio is something like 5,000 links from 1,000 domains (5,000/1,000.)
Spam vs. Substance
Next, you’ll need to determine the good and the bad links that are pointing to your site. The time you spent looking at your link diversity is helpful for this step. If you discovered an old site-wide link in a site’s footer pointing to your site, we’d consider that a bad link, or a bad group of links. The large volume of links coming from that one domain is usually a bad thing, no matter how high the metrics of that domain are.
Site-wide footer links aren’t that common for ecommerce sites, so it’s best to look at your links on a case-by-case basis. This is can be time consuming if you have a lot of links, so it might be a good idea to enlist the help of an experienced link auditor if you’re short on time. If you do want to take this on yourself, we recommend downloading the free Moz Bar extension for a quick glance at each site’s metrics. If you’re using a paid tool, these usually include domain metric for each link you download.
You want to weed out links pointing to your site from low-quality domains. Tools like the Moz Bar give you an idea of a website page’s domain authority (DA), page authority (PA), and other valuable metrics that determine quality. Low DA and PA usually means a site is less trustworthy to the search engines. Any link coming from a domain with a DA of 15 or lower should be avoided.
Aside from metrics like DA and PA, links coming from really poor sites are pretty easy to spot. Oftentimes, low-quality links come from irrelevant, foreign sites. You’ll see lots of pop-ups, random ads, and little value on those sites. The important thing to pay attention to is relevancy. For example, if your ecommerce store sells children’s clothes, and a site about gazebos is linking to yours, that link is probably irrelevant and provides no real value to users.
Link Removal
By this point, you’re aware of the diversity and the quality of the links pointing to your site. So, what if you’ve found a ton of low-quality links pointing to your site? Large numbers of bad links have the potential to be harmful and affect your site’s ability to be found on the SERPs. You want to avoid being penalized by Google for link manipulation or spam, so you need to think about removing these harmful links.
Your first step at link removal is to reach out the owners of the low-quality domains where your links are appearing. Sometimes outreach to those site owners isn’t successful. You just want to make sure you’ve made a good effort, and you’ve been kind during your communications with the site owners.
If you’ve made a good effort to contact the site owners and ask for removal, your next best step is to create and submit a file of low-quality links to Google's Disavow tool. The Disavow tool is connected to your WMT account and sends your file of poor links to Google’s team, suggesting they ignore the links you included when their bots crawl and index your site and links. Your outreach efforts must be documented in your disavow file to show Google you made an effort to remove links on your own.
Please note, disavow files must be created and uploaded with care, and in a very specific file format. If you have never used the disavow tool, we highly recommend doing a lot of research into proper use. Even more, it’s better to hire a link specialist that has experience creating and submitting disavow files. Once these files are submitted, they cannot be undone. You don’t want to risk including any links you don’t really want disavowed because this action is permanent.
We’ve gone over how to gather all of the links to your site, how to determine your link diversity, what good and bad links look like, and how to remove potentially harmful links. This is a lot of information to digest! But, you really need to do all of these things before you attempt to earn more good links. Having a healthy backlink profile is your first step. It’s better spend time cleaning up your backlinks, rather than just putting a band-aid on a much bigger issue.
Next week, we’ll explore the last part of our link earning series – building relationships!