The Basics of Website Link Analysis
Link analysis is crucial for maintaining the health of an ongoing website. It helps in evaluating the condition and brand exposure of your website. It also contributes to the various strategic and technical aspects of your website.
Link analysis is an exceptional way of determining the limitations of your overall strategy that will help you implement suitable ways of fixing it. The strategic analysis of a website can help in figuring out the success of your websites SEO.
If we consider the technical perspective, link analysis help identify the links that are not appropriate and can have negative effects on your website in the future. Therefore it is necessary to perform the right link analysis and also use the right tools to build effective links for your website.
Various tools can be used for compiling the links that you use on your website. All the links can be further used for link remediation tasks. Link remediation is almost similar to that of link pruning, which helps the experienced SEO professional to analyze the quality of the links.
It helps in removing the unnecessary and repetitive links that are lowering the quality of your website. Link remediation is an essential component of current link acquisitions depending upon the size and scope of your website. It is a great way to remove the website’s links that are harming the health of your website.
What do you mean by Link Analysis?
To put it in simple words, link analysis is a way of auditing all the links that are pointing back to your website. It helps to determine how effective and efficient your link profile is. Using link analysis, you have an insight into the problems that are affecting the rankings of your website.
Link remediation, link pruning, or link analysis are all the same processes with different names. A link profile disavow file is usually included with the link analysis that can be uploaded on Google’s disavow tool. It will give you the details about the health of your website.
Why is Link Analysis Needed?
Link analysis comes into the picture when you are analyzing the quality of your link profile and want to sustain or improve that quality. A link profile that has only a small amount of bad links isn’t a terrible situation.
However, if a significant amount of bad links are present on your link profile, then it is extremely important to conduct a regular link remediation schedule. The need for link analysis depends on how big your website is. You may require it once in a quarter or even once in six months if the website is simple and small. Link analysis can help you to find negative SEO campaigns and bring an improvement to the growth of your website.
Importance of Tools in Link Analysis
There’s an ample of tools available in the market for metrics tracking and link measurement. All these tools can be used to figure out plenty of information about the links of your website. But before you go ahead with the link acquisition campaign, it is essential to know where currently your website’s link profile ranks.
Your efforts may get doubled without achieving any significant results if you aren’t familiar with your link profile’s current state. You may work on the same links as before, and all the time and effort will go waste.
The link analysis tools are crucial to use as they are not only beneficial in dealing with large database sizes but also helps in discovering valuable links for your website. However, you must know that the 3rd party link analysis tools aren’t as effective as Google tools.
The third-party tools will help you get the duplicate links removed but not entirely. Hence, you should use tools that are highly efficient in their work process.
Links that are a Must to Include
The links are usually categorized into two types, good links, and bad links. A link that is considered good has all the E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trust) values. A bad is considered the one that deteriorates the overall ranking of your website and has a negative effect on SERP performance.
The primary goal of link pruning is to find the links that are negatively affecting the health of your website and remove them. Many situations may arrive where you have to take a quick action for such links.
Algorithmic Penalty or Manual Action
If a manual action is taken for a link that is going to your website, you will get notified from Google in the GSC. Also, you may notice that suddenly your traffic ratings will drop. In such a scenario, not much can be done immediately. You will have to work hard in link remediation and remove all the links that are harming your website.
Algorithmic devaluations, on the other hand, can be more challenging. Unlike manual action, you will not get any notification for the penalty, and you have to figure out the problem with your traffic droppings. Sometimes, even after spending a lot of time to find the issue, you still remain clueless about what has happened.
However, Google claims that they ignore false attempts at link building. But there are a plethora of examples to show that negative SEO is a thing. Google does not want to confirm this as this could lead to an increase in such attempts and affect Google authority.
Pages & Folders
The effects of an algorithmic devaluation are not just limited to your website, but to pages and folders that look spammy. If all of a sudden, the traffic of your website drops, it might be possible that the page that was driving the overall traffic has been devalued. Similarly, the folders for your website can also be targeted by building numerous spam pages inside the folder.
To combat this situation, Google Search Console statistics and Google Analytics can be used for narrowing down the folders and pages that are spammed.
What Is an Efficient Way to Do a Link Analysis?
The simplest way of doing a link analysis is by taking links from five different sources and then accumulating them all into a single spreadsheet. The sheet can then be used as a foundation for the efforts you will make in the link analysis.
The process behind combining the five different source link is to combine all the potential links together. The list can be further duplicated into a single list that can be used in the overall process. Making a list beforehand will reduce the efforts at later stages and also prevent redundancies in the links.
Tools Required for Link Analysis
Various tools can be used in the process of link analysis. Some of the most important tools are mentioned down below:
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a significant tool that is required for the link analysis of your website. But it is not viable to entirely rely on this tool. Hence it is necessary to make use of other tools as well. GSC consists of a list of links that are pointing back to your website and are found by Google.
As Google is the biggest and most successful search engine, it is essential to make Google believe in the links to your website. However, it is only limited to Google, and for making authority for your links on other search engines, you need to make use of other tools as well.
Ahref’s
Ahref’s is one of the most popular SEO tools that have the largest and most accurate link databases. Every experienced SEO marketer uses this premier tool for analyzing large volumes of links. The tool has extra-ordinary workability, and the link acquisition opportunities can be expanded big time using this tool. Have a look at some of the techniques and actions that this tool can perform:
You can examine the pages that are ranked high on your competitor’s website and take content ideas from there.
You can check out the ways your competitors are acquiring the links and follow their strategies for your website.
Alerts can be automated that can help the discovery of new and valuable links.
It helps in identifying the keywords that have higher ranks and better business potential.
You can audit your website using this tool and figure out the parameters that are negatively impacting your site.
The content gap analysis tool provided on the website helps to determine the gaps in your content strategy.
Ahref’s is undoubtedly one of the best link acquisition sites that you will find on the internet.
SEMrush
For an SEO marketer, SEMrush is one of the most efficient tools that helps them to test the authority of a given link. Moreover, SEMrush has a high reputation in the market as it lets you customize the link acquisition plan from the very beginning of the process. That means that you can go after the easier links first and pay attention to the difficult links at later stages.
Following things that can be done for link analysis using the SEMrush tools:
Harmful links are easy to locate and remove.
The link analysis process helps to discover the lost links and get them back.
SEMrush is efficient in tracing and removing all the negative links.
It also allows you to set notification alerts for any type of negative SEO.
SEMrush is a great tool that is not only efficient in link analysis but is extremely beneficial in other processes such as content marketing and social media marketing.
Majestic
Majestic is another effective link analysis tool that is easy to use and helps in exporting your links with efficiency. You can put the links together in a format that is functional and reader-friendly.
Check the below-given steps that can be used to make the link analysis process more productive and find all the negative links:
Majestic offers a neighborhood checker tool that gives you access to go through the links that belong to shared and the same IP addresses. Also, you can discover unearthing links that may be a part of a private blog network or any other link networks.
Mostly links from the same IP addresses come for sites that are small. These sites many times are using techniques such as on-page spam that can have a negative impact on the health of your websites.
Among the various link analysis functions of Majestic, one great function is that you can analyze the links that are embedded within the text and the pictures.
Majestic analyzes the links and content of the websites using its own metrics and measurement tools known as citation and trust flow. It helps to determine the authority of the given links.
Accumulating the Link Analysis Data from Different Tools
For an efficient link analysis process, the first step that you must take is to figure out all the required data from different tools and combine them together. A spreadsheet can be used for combining the data together and then creating a strategy for the right usage or removal of the links.
According to the industry that you are dealing with, you can create a strategy to add or remove the links as per their authority status. For figuring out the status of links, you should first segregate the links according to their link types (PBN link, press release link, forum links, etc.).
It will help you to differentiate between the spam links and non-spam links. Not all links that you will get from these tools are bad. A link can be both good or bad, depending upon how effectively they are fulfilling Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
What to do if you Witness a High Drop in your Website’s Ranking?
If you witness that the rankings of your website are dropping at a significantly high rate and you aren’t sure if it is due to a manual penalty, then you must figure out the reason for it. You need to analyze the data and determine if the rankings are dropping because of a penalty or algorithmic devaluation.
Although there might be other reasons for the decrease in traffic such as:
The loss of a critical link that was driving a significant amount of traffic.
Change in the content of the page.
Any change in the search query because of a low search for that specific term.
To figure out the exact problem, you can ask yourself the following questions:
When did you first notice the drop?
Hs there been any algorithm update recently that may have caused the drop?
Did you make any on-site changes that may have caused the drop?
Has the webpage become more spammy than before?
Have you lost any critical link that was driving the traffic?
While figuring out the answers to these questions, you will determine the actual cause of the droppings in your traffic rate. If the drop in the traffic has been due to algorithm devaluation, then you can go ahead with the link remediation process and remove all the bad links that are pointing to your website.
Use Link Analysis to Reveal Weaknesses and Build Strength for your Website
Link analysis is a significant process that helps in determining the information regarding the link profile of your website. The process of link analysis provides you with many key insights from the health of your website to the quality of links. It will help you check how well the links are following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and profiting your website.
In case you are under a penalty, link analysis will be crucial for the overall penalty recovery program. If an algorithmic devaluation has happened, you will be able to trace out where exactly the devaluation has taken place.
You should consider doing link analysis regularly as it can help you to determine the overall health of your website. Also, it makes sure that your link profile looks more natural. Therefore, link analysis is an excellent process that is helpful for your website’s health in many significant ways.