You may have engaged in auditing your link profiles only after noticing a drop in traffic and conversions or you may have done the same at regular intervals to identify and remove bad links. Whatever your reason, here are a few tips to help you conduct a thorough diagnosis of your links to bounce back with top rankings.
There are several link diagnostic tools that can help you identify problem links and deal with them. Two of the best ones are LinkResearchTools and MajesticSEO. These helpful tools provide a host of features including site explorer, backlink history checker, link map reports, etc., to help you identify good and bad quality links.
There are several metrics that need to be considered in identifying quality links. You should remember to check several key aspects such as matching anchor text to keywords, various types of links such as text, image, etc., the follow and nofollow link status, and deep link ratio.
In addition, auditing Top Level Domains along with country, Class C, IP, and other related aspects will help you locate links that are detrimental to the health of your website. You should certainly compare link profiles with your competitors, especially where you notice a drop in traffic by comparing referring domains, Class C, and IP.
You should ensure that you have a large number of referring domains that yield a low number of links rather than have few referring domains that yield a high number of links. In addition, MajesticSEO provides the historical links feature that can help provide data on the total amount of historical links for each keyword used for comparison with your competitors for the past 2 years. You can then extract a historical backlink report as well as view and analyze lost backlinks during that period.
Next, you should locate keywords that have witnessed a fall in traffic and check them when used in the anchor text. You will be able to identify a trend where some anchor text containing those keywords is located on the web that links to your site.
LinkResearchTools also offers the link audit detox feature that can help you locate and view the toxic link list. Once you click on the Detox Icon, you may have to wait for anytime between a few minutes to a few hours depending on the number of links that point to your website.
The resultant Link Detox Report will also point out websites that are de-indexed by Google containing links to your website that you do not want. However, you will additionally need to cross-check the links mentioned in that report with your historical backlink list report to confirm all bad links from each domain. You should also further explore suspicious links such as Susp 7 and 9 as they could be link farms that could be punished by major search engines such as Google.
Over time you will be able to decipher the report with much more clarity and your audit will lead to improved identification and removal of bad links.