Everything You Need To Know About Monitoring Your Backlinks

Intro

Over the years, backlinks and quality content have been among the most important ranking factors on Google. But not all backlinks have the potential to enhance your page ranking. Worse, low-quality, or wrong backlinks can leave a black mark on your website.

That is why backlink monitoring should be an important part of your SEO strategy. Without building quality backlinks and monitoring them correctly, your SEO strategy will fail.

You can build trust and authority with search engines by grasping how to monitor backlinks effectively. It helps you rank better and drive larger, higher-quality traffic to your website.

In this blog post, we'll detail different outstanding ways to monitor backlinks. At the same time, we’ll also explain why such methods are important and how to manage your links using SEO tools.

1. Track and remove spammy backlinks from your website

Not all backlinks your website receives are beneficial and healthy. Without thorough audits, you can receive links from spammy websites. These are the links digital marketers call spammy backlinks.

Spammy backlinks can make Google devalue your site's quality and reputation. In particular, when your website has too many spammy links, Google can penalize the site. This results in a drop in SEO rankings. In fact, in 2017, Google warned about an increase in spammy links in guest posting articles.

But how can you track bad links from your website? Usually, SEO experts filter spammy backlinks by domain authority and page authority on Google Search Console. But this can take a lot of time and effort to do. Thus, today you can use backlink checker tools such as WebCEO, Ranktracker, or Semrush to examine your list of backlinks.

With Ranktracker, for example, you will receive a detailed backlist report with a spam score for each link. When you notice a backlink with a high spam score, start investigating it to determine if it is indeed a spammy link. For example, check the anchor text and the context in which the link is added. Analyze the overall type of content of the website. Is that link coming from a comment? These are some of the ways to detect a spammy backlink. Ronald Osborne, the founder of Osborne Digital Marketing, suggests that monitoring your backlinks will help you accurately forecast your SEO results.

2. Do a backlink audit

A backlink audit is a process of reviewing all links pointing to your website. Regular backlink auditing helps you determine which links are good and bad. That then allows you to maintain a healthy backlink profile at all times. Not only that, but it can also help you improve your link-building strategies, whether through guest posting or campaigns involving outreach for link insertions.

Here are some basic steps you can do to start your manual audit:

• Compare your backlinks with those of competitors
• Find and test each of your backlinks
• Disavow or remove toxic backlinks
• Build more valuable links for your website

The good news is you don't need to audit and monitor backlinks manually. Instead, you can use a backlink checker tool for backlink audits to get a high-level view of your backlink profile health. In addition to the techniques mentioned above, it's important to regularly evaluate the overall health of your backlinks to ensure long-term success. A backlink audit is essential for identifying harmful links that could negatively affect your website's performance. By routinely auditing your backlink profile, you can uncover valuable insights about your link-building efforts and adjust strategies to focus on higher-quality links. This proactive approach will not only protect your site from penalties but also help improve your SEO rankings.

3. Check the live status of core backlinks

Core backlinks are "do-follow" links coming from high-authority domains. This "do-follow" attribute allows search engines to crawl, index, and follow links.

When your website has a do-follow backlink from another website, the reputation and authority of that site are also shared with yours. This is called "link juice."

Link juice is a vital factor for search engine optimization (SEO). It helps increase your domain authority and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

For this reason, core backlinks are the most valuable links on your website. So you need to use tracking tools (e.g., Ranktracker or Ahrefs) to evaluate and improve the authority your website obtains from reputable domains.

Here’s an example of how you can check the status of critical backlinks with a backlink checker:

This tool gives a deep look at which core backlinks are making the biggest difference. The only thing you need to do is enter your site’s domain name. In the dashboard, you can analyze all essential metrics like do-follow/no-follow status of your valuable backlinks.

4. Analyze guest post performance

Guest posting means writing an article for another company's website. This is one of the best link-building strategies. For writing a valuable piece of content for another website, you get to include a do-follow link going back to your own website.

Lots of website owners use this technique. According to the latest research from Referral Rock, 60% of bloggers write one to five guest posts per month.

In the past, links on guest posts were the most important for websites. When your website gets a backlink from a top-performing guest post, it would drive high traffic to your site and a boost in rankings.

Yet an increase in spammy links within articles like guest posts changed Google's guidelines in page ranking. So, to avoid Google’s penalties and ensure long-term success, you must track the performance of your guest posts.

Below are some important things you need to focus on when you analyze your post's performance:

• High-quality backlinks: You need to check each link's domain rating, spam score, and more on a backlink monitor. This ensures you're not guest posting for websites that could potentially tarnish your site’s reputation.
• Anchor texts: The anchor texts used must be relevant to your backlinks. The should accurately describe what the user will find on your website when they click that link.
• Relevant, high-quality content: Guest posting is not just about link building. It's also important that you deliver valuable content. Besides boosting your reputation, this content will also help you rank better. Remember, these guest posts will be credited to you as the author. So you want to make a good impression through helpful and optimized content.

Guest posts are really effective for building backlinks but you must stay on top of those campaigns. Be mindful of the websites you’re guest posting for. And even after your guest posts get published, monitor them regularly to ensure they’re still delivering value, i.e., check to ensure the anchor text is still relevant and the website is performing well.

5. Monitor the impact on ranking change

Backlinks are the backbone of your SEO campaigns. They improve brand awareness, drive higher traffic, and enhance SEO ranking. For this reason, the most noticeable benefit of backlink tracking is measuring the impact on ranking changes.

But it’s hard to determine how each backlink impacts your website's ranking, especially if you’re earning and building backlinks continuous. Therefore, it’s much easier to track ranking changes per campaign.

Let’s say you started a campaign in June with a keyword portfolio and a backlink list from relevant, trusted domains. You can assess how this campaign impacts your site’s ranking after, for example, four to five months.

Use a rank tracking tool to monitor the impact of your SEO campaigns. Doing so will help you optimize your campaigns for the best results. For example, if you don’t notice a significant change in rankings after, you may want to reconsider your approach. Perhaps, you want to look for other more relevant and high authority websites for your guest posts.

Do keep in mind, however, that SEO takes time to generate results. So don’t panic if you don’t see any improvements after the first month.

6. Campaign URL tracking

Once you've completed all link-building campaigns, it doesn't mean your job wraps up. The next essential step is tracking all campaign URLs.

Why is campaign URL tracking that important? Without tracking your campaign links, you're likely to create content that isn't as effective as you thought.

Let's say you build a high volume of quality content to draw more leads. But not all types of content give you desired outcomes.

When you track the URLs of the content you post online, you can see which ones receive the most engagement. Also, you can understand how successful your backlink strategy is. This allows you to focus your efforts on the content that produces the best return on investment.

You can use backlink monitoring tools to implement different levels of tracking. These tools can work alongside Google Webmaster Tools to show you insightful data on your organic traffic.

One downside of link-building campaigns is you don't have control of websites that contain your backlinks. When the editors redesign websites or unintentionally attach your links with unsuitable anchor texts. Worse, the impact of your high-quality earned links can be affected.

So you should check anchor texts and remove suspicious links as needed. Additionally, you need to set up email alerts on your tool to see whether any unexpected changes happen.

If you identify any issue, you need to email the website editors to fix it promptly.

In Closing

Search engines see incoming links as "votes." The more backlinks you get from relevant and reputable websites the more impact these “votes” have on your website’s SEO. By tracking backlinks effectively, you get to ensure that no suspicious “votes” point towards your website.

From this website, you’ve learned how to monitor backlinks in six ways. You need to track and remove spammy backlinks, do a backlink audit, and check the live status of core backlinks. Moreover, you should analyze the performance of your guest posts, monitor the impact on ranking change, and track campaign URLs.

From this handy guide, you should be able to monitor backlinks as a pro. Good luck.