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How to Do a Backlink Audit: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide

A backlink audit is one of the most valuable exercises you can carry out for a website's long-term SEO health. Whether you have just taken over a domain, are preparing to launch a link building campaign, or simply want to understand why a site is not performing as expected in organic search, a thorough audit of your link profile will surface answers that no other analysis can provide.

This guide walks through the entire process — what a backlink audit is, why it matters, which tools to use, and an eight-step process you can follow from start to finish.

What Is a Backlink Audit?

A backlink audit is a thorough examination of every inbound link pointing to your website. These links come from external domains — referred to as referring domains — and collectively make up your backlink profile.

The audit reviews those links across multiple dimensions: how many there are, where they originate, what anchor text they use, whether they pass authority or not, and whether any of them pose a risk to your rankings.

The output of a well-executed audit is a comprehensive picture of your current link position, a list of issues to address, and a set of opportunities to pursue in your next campaign. It is the necessary starting point for any serious link building strategy and the most reliable diagnostic tool available when something in your organic traffic has gone wrong.

Why a Backlink Audit Is Worth Your Time

Auditing your backlink profile is not a single-purpose exercise. It simultaneously serves four distinct goals.

Benchmarking your position. Before you can measure the impact of any link building activity, you need to know where you are starting from. An audit captures your current referring domain count, your total link volume, your domain authority score, your dofollow-to-nofollow ratio, and your link acquisition velocity. These numbers become the baseline against which every future campaign result is measured.

Identifying harmful links. Not every link pointing at your site is working in your favour. Links from private blog networks, link farms, automated comment spam, and irrelevant foreign-language sites can attract algorithmic suppression or, in severe cases, a manual penalty from a Google Search evaluator. A backlink audit surfaces these links so you can decide whether to remove or disavow them.

Finding link building opportunities. The content on your site that already attracts links tells you something important: it is the type of content other publishers in your space consider worth citing. Knowing which pages those are — and why they attract links — gives you a replicable template for future content investment.

Gaining competitive intelligence. Applying the same analytical process to your competitors' backlink profiles reveals the publishers they are earning links from, the content formats that work in your niche, and the gap between their current link profile strength and yours. This intelligence directly informs the targeting and prioritisation of your next outreach campaign.

Choosing Your Audit Tools

The right toolset makes the difference between a superficial audit and one that surfaces actionable insight. Four tools are worth understanding before you begin.

For most practitioners, using Google Search Console alongside Ahrefs provides the most complete picture. Search Console supplies the manual action data and the ground-truth link list from Google itself, while Ahrefs adds the contextual detail — traffic estimates for referring domains, anchor text breakdowns, and DR scoring — that Search Console lacks. Moz is a worthwhile addition specifically for its Spam Score metric. Majestic and SpyFu are credible alternatives if cost is a constraint.

The Eight-Step Backlink Audit Process

Step 1: Establish Your Baseline Metrics

Before examining individual links, record the headline numbers that characterise your current backlink profile. This creates the benchmark you will use to measure future progress.

The metrics to capture at this stage are:

• Total backlink count — every link pointing to your site, including multiple links from the same domain
• Referring domain count — the number of unique domains linking to you, where each domain counts once regardless of how many individual links it has placed
• Dofollow link count — the subset of links that pass authority and are counted by Google's ranking algorithm
• Domain rating or domain authority score — the composite authority metric produced by your chosen tool, based on the quality and quantity of your inbound link profile
• Link acquisition velocity — the rate at which your site has been gaining new referring domains over recent months, visible in the referring domains graph in Ahrefs

Dofollow links are the links that actually move the needle on rankings, so tracking the dofollow count separately from the total link count gives you a clearer read on the profile's genuine quality. A site with 10,000 total backlinks but only 200 dofollow links from unique domains has a very different profile to one where 80% of links are dofollow.

Record these figures in a spreadsheet at the start of every audit so you can track movement over time.

Step 2: Identify Your Most-Linked Content

The second step shifts from your overall profile to the specific pages within it. Your goal here is to identify which pages attract the most inbound links and understand why.

In Google Search Console, navigate to Links in the sidebar and open the Top Linked Pages report. In Ahrefs, the equivalent is the Best by Links report under the Pages section.

Once you have this data, look for patterns in the content types that appear most frequently at the top of the list. Common high-link content formats include:

• Original research and data studies
• Comprehensive statistical roundup pages
• Free tools or calculators
• Definitive guides on foundational topics
• Template libraries

These patterns have direct strategic implications. Pages that already attract a disproportionate share of your inbound links are strong candidates for linkable asset outreach — you already have evidence the content resonates with publishers in your space, so promoting it further to relevant sites is a logical next step. The content types represented in your top linked pages also suggest where future content investment is likely to produce link-attractive material.

An additional use for this data is internal linking. Pages with strong inbound link profiles accumulate authority. Using those pages as internal linking hubs that point toward your high-value commercial pages — service pages, product pages, or category pages — channels that authority to where it most directly supports revenue.

Step 3: Catalogue Your Link Types

Different types of links tell you different things about a site's link building history. Knowing what mix of link types makes up your profile helps you understand what strategies have been used before and where gaps or over-concentrations exist.

When reviewing your full backlink list in Ahrefs — accessible via the Backlinks section under Backlink Profile — look for these common link categories:

Guest posts are links earned by contributing editorial content to another publication. They typically appear in contextually relevant articles, use varied anchor text, and come from sites with genuine audiences. A profile with a healthy share of guest post links suggests consistent outreach activity.

Editorial mentions are unpaid, unsolicited links placed because a publisher found the content independently valuable. These are the most algorithmically trusted link type and the hardest to manufacture deliberately.

Niche edits are paid placements within existing content on third-party sites. Their presence is often signalled by exact-match keyword anchor text and by placement in articles where the link adds little obvious editorial value.

Roundup and expert contribution links appear in articles that aggregate opinions from multiple sources. A significant concentration of these links can suggest the site has used platforms like HARO or journalist outreach services.

Directory and pillow links include social profiles, business directory listings, and platform pages. These are typically nofollow and contribute primarily to profile diversity rather than authority transfer.

Understanding the mix informs your future campaign decisions — if your profile is heavily weighted toward pillow links with limited editorial coverage, for instance, the priority for your next campaign is clear.

Step 4: Find and Remove Harmful Links

This is the defensive component of the audit — the step that protects your site from penalties rather than building on its strengths.

Check Search Console for active manual actions first. Navigate to Security and Manual Actions in the sidebar. If a manual action is present, it will describe the nature of the issue and the pages affected. Resolving a manual action takes priority over every other audit activity, because attempting to rank with an active penalty in place is not viable. The resolution process involves identifying and removing or disavowing the triggering links, then submitting a reconsideration request through Search Console.

Run a Spam Score check in Moz. Moz's Spam Score metric expresses the percentage of your inbound links that originate from domains with characteristics similar to sites that have been penalised by Google. The tool orders your links from highest to lowest spam score, making it straightforward to identify the highest-risk domains for further manual review.

Audit your ccTLD distribution. Country Code Top-Level Domains signal the national origin of a linking domain — .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .de for Germany, and so on. If the geographic distribution of your links is heavily weighted toward countries with no obvious connection to your content or audience, that asymmetry is a signal of potentially manipulative link activity. Ahrefs displays this breakdown in the Backlink Overview report.

Review your anchor text distribution. A natural backlink profile has anchor text that is predominantly branded, naked URL, or title-based, with a smaller proportion of partial-match and exact-match keyword anchors. Anchors related to topics entirely unrelated to your site — casinos, pharmaceuticals, adult content — are a strong signal of either a negative SEO attack or inherited spam links. The table below summarises the anchor text signals to watch for:

When you find harmful links, you have two response options. For most sites with a small proportion of low-quality links, taking no action is appropriate — Google's algorithm has become highly competent at ignoring these links without them causing ranking damage. When the volume of problematic links is significant enough to pose a genuine penalty risk, disavow through Google Search Console using a properly formatted disavow file listing the domains to be ignored. Direct removal requests to webmasters are worth attempting first, particularly if a manual action is already in place, since Google expects evidence of removal attempts in a reconsideration request.

Step 5: Surface Content Refresh Opportunities

Pages that have accumulated meaningful inbound links but are not attracting organic search traffic represent a specific and often overlooked opportunity. The links demonstrate that publishers consider the content worth citing, which is the authority foundation needed to rank — but something in the content itself is preventing rankings from materialising.

In Ahrefs, cross-reference your top pages by links with their estimated organic traffic. Pages where links are high but traffic is low are your refresh candidates.

The most common reasons for this gap include:

• Content that is outdated and no longer accurately reflects current information, causing Google to deprioritise it for freshness-sensitive queries
• Poor on-page optimisation, including weak title tags, missing or misaligned header structure, or thin body content
• A mismatch with the searcher intent Google associates with the target keyword

Diagnosing searcher intent is straightforward: search for your target keyword and examine the format and content of the pages that currently rank. If your page is a product-focused landing page but the top-ranking results are all list-format comparison articles, the page format itself is misaligned with what Google expects for that query. Updating the page format to match the dominant intent of competing ranking pages is often the single most impactful change available for these underperforming high-link pages.

Step 6: Fix Broken Backlinks and 404 Errors

Every link pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists is wasted authority. The referring domain has made an editorial decision to cite your content, but the link juice from that decision is going nowhere because the destination page returns a 404 error.

Ahrefs identifies these broken backlinks in the Broken Backlinks report under the Backlink Profile menu. The report shows both the broken destination URLs and the referring pages that link to them, giving you the complete picture of what needs to be fixed.

The fix is a 301 redirect from the old broken URL to the most relevant live page on your site. The 301 redirect preserves the link equity from the referring domain and ensures that visitors following the link reach relevant content rather than an error page.

Common methods for implementing 301 redirects include:

• An SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math (for WordPress sites)
• Direct editing of the site's .htaccess file
• Redirect management tools provided by the site's hosting platform

Recovering authority that was already earned through the editorial decisions of other publishers — and that is currently being wasted on dead pages — is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-effort improvements available from a backlink audit.

Step 7: Analyse Your Competitors' Backlink Profiles

With your own profile fully understood, turn the same analytical process toward the sites you compete with for rankings. Run the same benchmarking steps — referring domain count, DR, anchor text distribution, and top-linked content — for each primary competitor.

The competitive analysis surfaces several categories of actionable intelligence:

• Publishers that link to multiple competitors but not to you represent warm prospecting targets. They have already demonstrated willingness to link to content in your niche — the outreach conversation starts from a position of established relevance rather than cold introduction.
• Content types that consistently attract links across competitor profiles reveal the formats and topics that the publisher community in your niche responds to.
• The gap between your DR and the DR of sites ranking above you for your target keywords sets a concrete link building target — the authority level your profile needs to reach to be genuinely competitive.

Step 8: Check for Negative SEO Attacks

The final audit step is a diagnostic check for deliberate manipulation of your backlink profile by competitors. A negative SEO attack involves a third party pointing large volumes of low-quality, manipulative, or irrelevant links at your site in an attempt to trigger an algorithmic or manual penalty.

The signals that distinguish a negative SEO attack from organic accumulation of low-quality links include sudden unexplained spikes in your referring domain count — particularly from domains with the high-risk characteristics described in Step 4 — and the appearance of anchor text completely unrelated to your site's topic or brand.

Regular backlink monitoring, rather than one-off audits, is the most effective protection against negative SEO. Setting up alerts in Ahrefs or Google Search Console to notify you when new referring domains appear means you can investigate anomalies quickly, before a sudden influx of manipulative links has time to influence your rankings or attract manual review.

If a negative SEO attack is confirmed, the response is the same as for any other accumulated toxic links: attempt direct removal where possible, then disavow the attacking domains through Search Console.

Turning Audit Findings into Campaign Strategy

The value of a backlink audit does not end when the analysis is complete. The findings should directly shape your link building strategy for the months ahead.

A well-conducted audit produces a clear set of priorities. Broken backlinks to fix, disavow files to submit, content pages to refresh, competitor link sources to target, and content formats to replicate — each of these is a concrete, ranked action item rather than a general intention. That specificity is what makes the audit the most important planning exercise available to anyone serious about organic growth.

If you would like to discuss what a thorough backlink audit reveals about your site and how to translate those findings into a campaign, reach out at [email protected].