Backlink analysis
that reveals competitor strategies.

How to Perform a Backlink Analysis Like a Professional

Every effective link building strategy begins with understanding what already exists. Before you decide which sites to target, which pages to prioritise, or which tactics to deploy, you need a clear picture of your current link position — what is working, what is broken, what is harmful, and how your profile compares to the sites competing with you for the same rankings.

That picture comes from a backlink analysis. At any serious link building agency, it is the first task performed on every new client engagement, and it is the diagnostic tool that makes the difference between a campaign that builds on genuine insight and one that simply generates activity without direction.

This guide covers what a backlink analysis is, when to perform one, the six-step process for doing it well, and how to turn the findings into a coherent action plan.

What a Backlink Analysis Is

A backlink analysis is a systematic review of every inbound link pointing to a website, examined across multiple dimensions to reveal the quality, structure, and strategic implications of the link profile.

A thorough analysis answers six questions that no other research can answer as efficiently:

• Which pages on your site attract the most links, and what does that reveal about the type of content your niche rewards?
• Which pages would benefit most from new links, and how does your current coverage compare to competing pages in the rankings?
• Are there broken links on your site that are wasting authority earned through other publishers' editorial decisions?
• Does your profile contain spam or toxic links that pose a penalty risk or are already suppressing rankings?
• What does your competitors' link profile look like, and where do they have link advantages over you that explain their stronger rankings?
• What is your overall starting position, so that future campaign results can be measured against a meaningful baseline?

Backlink analysis tools make this process systematic rather than manual. Ahrefs is the most widely used professional tool for this work, with the most comprehensive link database and the most granular per-link context. Moz, SEMrush, and Majestic are credible alternatives with their own strengths — Moz's Spam Score metric is particularly useful for toxicity detection, SEMrush provides a dedicated backlink audit feature with automatic toxicity flagging, and Majestic offers Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics that give a different angle on link quality assessment.

When Backlink Analysis Is Most Valuable

Backlink analysis is not a one-time exercise. There are specific occasions when performing one produces the most actionable results.

Before starting a link building campaign. This is the baseline use case. Before any outreach begins or any content is produced for link acquisition, an analysis establishes your starting position across all key metrics — referring domain count, domain rating, dofollow ratio, top-linked pages, and anchor text distribution. Without this baseline, you have no way to measure whether the campaign is producing results or simply consuming budget.

At regular intervals during an active campaign. Monthly or bi-monthly analysis during an active campaign allows you to track whether links are being indexed, whether referring domain counts are moving in the right direction, and whether domain authority is improving as a result. It also catches any new spam links or unexpected link losses that would otherwise go undetected until they affect rankings.

After an unexplained ranking drop. When organic traffic falls and no obvious on-page change explains it, the link profile is one of the first places to investigate. A sudden influx of toxic links — from a negative SEO attack or from a previously undetected link scheme — can suppress rankings without triggering a manual action. A fresh analysis after any significant ranking decrease can identify these issues before they compound.

Following a manual penalty. If Google Search Console reports a manual action related to your link profile, a thorough backlink analysis is the immediate next step. The analysis identifies the specific links triggering the penalty, which need to be removed or disavowed before a reconsideration request can succeed.

Before purchasing an existing website. The backlink profile of any site you are considering acquiring is material information for the purchase decision. A profile full of toxic links from PBNs or link farms creates significant remediation work post-acquisition. Broken links representing wasted authority signal an immediate quick-win opportunity. And the quality of the existing referring domain profile tells you whether you are acquiring genuine organic equity or a site that looks stronger than it is because of historical links that are already being discounted.

If you have never done one. Many sites that have been active for years have never had a systematic analysis of their backlink profile. Regardless of where you are in your SEO journey, there are almost always broken links to recover, content refresh opportunities to surface, and competitive insights to extract from a first-ever analysis.

The Six-Step Backlink Analysis Process

Step 1: Establish Your Baseline Overview

The first step is to pull the headline numbers that characterise your current backlink profile at the domain level. This creates the benchmark against which every future analysis measurement will be compared.

Open your chosen SEO tool — Ahrefs is the most efficient for this — enter your domain, and record the following metrics:

Referring domains are the number of unique websites that link to you at least once, regardless of how many individual links each has placed. This is the most important single number in your profile because it reflects the breadth of sites that have made independent editorial decisions to cite your content. A profile with 500 links from 400 referring domains is vastly stronger than one with 500 links from 15 referring domains.

Referring pages is the total count of individual pages across all domains that contain a link to you. This gives a sense of depth within referring domains — how many pages on each linking site have chosen to cite your content.

New and lost links tracks velocity — how quickly you are gaining and losing links over time. A healthy growing profile shows consistent new link acquisition outpacing losses. A profile where losses regularly exceed gains is losing authority and needs attention.

Country code top-level domain distribution shows the geographic origin of your links. An English-language site targeting a US or UK audience with a disproportionate share of links from country-code domains like .cn, .ru, or .in is a signal worth investigating — these links may be natural, but a heavy skew toward unrelated geographic domains can indicate spam accumulation.

Domain rating (DR) or domain authority (DA) is the composite authority score produced by your tool. This single number synthesises the quality and quantity of your entire link profile into a comparable metric. Record it as your starting benchmark.

Step 2: Identify Your Top-Performing Pages

With the domain-level overview established, shift focus to the page level. The goal of this step is to understand which specific pages on your site attract the most links and why.

In Ahrefs, the "Best by links" report under the Pages section displays every page on your site ranked by inbound link count, with a breakdown of dofollow versus nofollow links for each. This report surfaces three categories of actionable insight.

Content format signals. Pages at the top of this list reveal what content types your niche rewards with links. Across most industries, original research and data studies consistently attract the highest link volumes — because writers need sources to cite. Free tools attract links because they solve genuine recurring problems. Comprehensive definitive guides attract links because publishers reference them rather than reproducing the same information themselves. Statistics roundup pages attract links for the same reason as research: they give writers a citable source. When you identify which of these formats appears most prominently in your top-linked pages, you have a validated template for future content investment.

Linkable asset identification. Pages that have already attracted links organically are proven link magnets within your niche. These pages are the strongest candidates for a linkable asset outreach campaign — the existing link profile demonstrates that other publishers consider the content worth citing, making outreach to additional relevant sites significantly more persuasive than it would be for new content with no track record.

Internal linking opportunities. Pages with strong inbound link profiles accumulate more authority than pages without links. That authority can be shared with other pages through internal links. Identify the pages at the top of your "best by links" report that relate topically to your highest-priority commercial pages — product pages, service pages, or conversion-focused landing pages — and add internal links from those authority-rich pages to your commercial targets. This moves link equity to where it most directly supports revenue without requiring any new link acquisition.

Step 3: Find Pages That Would Benefit Most from New Links

The third step shifts from analysing what you have to identifying what you should prioritise in your next campaign. Not every page benefits equally from new links, and allocating link acquisition effort toward pages with the greatest potential return is one of the most impactful strategic decisions in any link building programme.

Three characteristics identify pages as strong link building candidates.

High commercial value. Pages that directly drive revenue are your highest-priority link targets regardless of their current ranking position. For e-commerce sites, category pages and high-margin product pages. For SaaS companies, pricing pages and product feature pages. For service businesses, service-specific landing pages. For affiliate sites, review pages and "best of" roundups. Improving the rankings of these pages through link acquisition has a direct path to revenue impact that informational content links do not.

Pages ranking on the edge of page one. A page that currently ranks in positions six through fifteen for its target keyword is in a highly leverageable position. Google has already signalled trust in the page by showing it for relevant searches — the issue is not indexation or relevance but simply insufficient authority relative to the top five results. One or two high-quality links can be enough to move a page from position eight to position three, and the traffic difference between those positions is substantial. The same link investment applied to a page on page five or beyond rarely produces visible results within a reasonable timeframe. Find your pages in that positions six-to-fifteen window and prioritise them.

Pages outranked by competitors with a bridgeable link gap. A competitive backlink comparison reveals specific pages where your competitors have a link advantage over you that is achievable to close. A competitor page ranking above yours with twelve referring domains when yours has five is a realistic gap to address through a targeted link acquisition campaign. A competitor page with four hundred referring domains when yours has twenty is not a realistic near-term target and should not be prioritised at the expense of more achievable opportunities. Be precise about the gap you are trying to close and select pages where the arithmetic of link acquisition makes sense.

The table below summarises how to rank page candidates for link building priority:

Step 4: Find and Fix Broken Backlinks

Broken backlinks are one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost opportunities in any backlink analysis. They represent authority that has already been earned — another publisher made an editorial decision to cite your content — but that authority is currently flowing to a dead page rather than benefiting your site.

A broken backlink occurs when a link on an external site points to a URL on your domain that no longer exists, typically returning a 404 error. This happens most commonly when pages are deleted without redirects being set up, when URLs are changed without updating the links pointing to the old addresses, or occasionally when a typo in the original link was never caught because the page existed at the time of publication.

In Ahrefs, the Broken Backlinks report under the Backlink Profile section lists every external link pointing to a non-existent URL on your site, along with the referring page and the specific URL that is broken. This gives you the complete information needed to decide on the appropriate fix for each case.

When the broken URL was a page you deleted or moved: set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the most relevant current page on your site. The 301 redirect preserves the link equity from the external link and ensures visitors following the link reach content rather than an error page. On WordPress sites, SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math include redirect managers that make this straightforward. On other platforms, redirects can typically be configured through the hosting control panel or by editing the site's .htaccess file.

When the broken URL contains a typo that was never in a real URL: set up a redirect from the mistyped URL to the correct page. This is often the faster fix since you do not need to communicate with the external site owner.

When the broken link points to a page you deleted and no obvious current redirect target exists: either create a new page at the relevant URL, or redirect to the closest thematically appropriate existing page. The latter is acceptable when the content gap is genuine; the former is preferable when there is demand for the content.

Recovering authority from broken backlinks is pure upside — no new outreach, no content creation, and no cost beyond the time to set up the redirects.

Step 5: Identify and Address Spam Links

Every established site accumulates some proportion of low-quality links over time, whether through automated spam, forum comment injection, or competitor-initiated negative SEO attacks. The task in this step is to distinguish links that are genuinely harmful from the background noise of incidental low-quality links that Google already ignores, and to take appropriate action only on the former.

Three indicators signal a link that warrants closer investigation.

Mismatched country code top-level domains. A site serving an English-speaking audience with a disproportionate concentration of links from country-code domains unrelated to its market is exhibiting a pattern worth reviewing manually. Not every foreign-domain link is spam — international coverage is natural for sites with genuine global appeal — but a heavy skew toward one or two unrelated country codes is unusual for organic link profiles.

Suspicious domain names. Some spam domains are identifiable from their names alone — names that are nonsensical strings, names that reference adult or pharmaceutical content, or names constructed from keyword combinations in a way that suggests bulk domain creation for link scheme purposes. These are worth visiting manually to confirm the nature of the site.

Anchor text anomalies. Your anchor text report should show a natural distribution of branded anchors, naked URLs, title-based anchors, and a modest proportion of partial or exact-match keyword anchors. Anchors for topics entirely unrelated to your site — pharmaceuticals, casinos, adult content, gambling — are a clear spam signal regardless of the linking domain's metrics. A high concentration of exact-match keyword anchors from low-DR domains can signal either a PBN link scheme or a historical link building campaign that used manipulative anchor text at scale.

When manual review of a flagged link confirms that the linking site is a genuine spam or link farm domain — characterised by thin or auto-generated content, no real organic traffic, suspicious outbound link patterns, and no identifiable editorial purpose — you have two options. Where the volume of spam links is small and Google shows no signs of penalising you for them, leaving them alone is often the right call. Google's algorithm is increasingly adept at discounting these links without them causing active harm, and unnecessary disavow activity can remove legitimate authority. Where spam links are numerous, consistent in their profile, or already implicated in a manual action, creating a disavow file and uploading it to Google Search Console is the appropriate response.

Step 6: Analyse Your Competitors' Backlink Profiles

The final step turns the same analytical process outward, applying it to the websites competing with you for your target keywords. Competitor backlink analysis produces competitive intelligence that cannot be obtained any other way, and it directly informs both your content strategy and your link acquisition targeting.

Run the same headline overview, top pages, and anchor text checks on each of your primary competitors' domains. The insights this produces fall into three categories.

Content format intelligence. The pages at the top of your competitors' "best by links" reports reveal what content types attract links within your shared niche. If three of your top competitors all have original research studies at the top of their most-linked pages, that is strong evidence that research content is a high-performing link magnet in your space. If resource pages and tool lists dominate, that points in a different direction. This intelligence validates or challenges your assumptions about what to create.

Link target intelligence. The referring domains linking to your competitors' most authoritative pages represent pre-qualified prospects for your own outreach. A site that has already linked to your competitor's guide on a topic you also cover has demonstrated willingness to link to this type of content — they are warm prospects rather than cold ones. Export the referring domain lists from your competitors' top pages and filter for sites you are not yet receiving links from. These become some of your highest-priority outreach targets.

Ranking gap intelligence. Comparing the referring domain count for your pages versus the competing pages ranking above you for the same keywords reveals the link gap you need to close to become competitive. This is more actionable than looking at DR alone because it focuses on the specific pages in competition rather than the overall domain authority comparison. A page with five referring domains outranked by a competitor page with eight is a gap you can realistically address; one with five outranked by a competitor with two hundred is a different problem requiring a different solution.

From Analysis to Action Plan

A backlink analysis is only as valuable as the actions it produces. The six steps above generate findings across several dimensions simultaneously, and the final task is to organise those findings into a prioritised action plan.

The priority order for most sites follows a consistent logic. First, address any active manual penalties — these block ranking progress regardless of any other improvements and must be resolved before other work produces results. Second, implement 301 redirects for broken backlinks — this recovers authority already earned at no additional outreach cost and takes effect quickly. Third, submit a disavow file for confirmed toxic links if the volume warrants it. Fourth, begin link acquisition to the highest-priority pages identified in step three, using the competitor link intelligence from step six to target your outreach. Fifth, invest in new linkable assets validated by the content format patterns surfaced in steps two and six.

Revisiting the analysis every six to eight weeks during an active campaign maintains visibility on whether the strategy is producing movement and catches new issues before they develop into significant problems.

If you would like support running a backlink analysis on your site or building a link strategy from the findings, reach out at [email protected].