What Is a Backlink Profile for SEO and How to Analyze It?

What is a backlink profile? It’s the collection of the inbound links pointing to your website. It provides information about the number and quality of the links, anchor texts, the link’s relevance to the subject matter, and linking domain rating. A good backlink profile should have many organic, high-authority links that come from relevant domains and include a variety of backlinks.

How to analyze your backlink profile? You’ll need to use one of the SEO tools, like SEMrush or Ahrefs, but it’s also possible to use Google Search Console for this purpose. First, you have to analyze the referring domains and the number of backlinks coming from them. Then, you need to analyze whether the links use a variety of anchors. You should also consider how often you acquire new backlinks – a velocity that is too high might result in Google penalizing your website. Finally, analyze the quality of the links – what is the domain authority (DA) of the sites they’re coming from, how relevant they are, and what anchors they are placed on.

Do you want to learn more? Then keep reading this article!

What Is a Backlink Profile?

Let’s start with a backlink profile definition. In general terms, it’s all the backlinks leading to your website collected into one place, with additional data, such as:

• quantity of the links,
• referring domains,
• quality of the links,
• link topic relevance,
• anchor texts,
• linking domain authority/rating.

Why is a backlink profile important? Because inbound links are among the most crucial ranking factors when it comes to SEO, and a backlink profile gives you a detailed insight into them.

Backlink Audit – How to Analyze Your Backlink Profile?

Knowing what a backlink profile is, let’s discuss how to analyze and gain the most insights out of the data in it.

1. Access Your Backlink Profile

In order to analyze your backlink profile…you need to see it first, right? Thankfully, there’s a plethora of tools that enable that, so let’s quickly go through some of them.

• Google Search Console – Click links on the sidebar, then external links. The downside of this method is that GSC displays only the top 1000 sites that link to you, so if there are more, you won’t see a full backlink profile.
• SEMrush – Go into backlink analytics, enter your domain URL, and access the backlinks report. There, you’ll have all your links and statistics regarding them, which you can filter through to get to the ones that matter the most.
• Ahrefs – Open the site explorer, enter your URL, and choose what interests you – the backlink profile sidebar has several categories to choose from, from a general backlinks overview to checking broken backlinks, referring domains, anchors, referring IPs, and link intersect.

2. Check Your Number of Backlinks

Once you’ve accessed your backlink profile, analyze it starting from the numbers. While there’s no exact way to determine how many links translate to better positions in SERPs, the more, the better – as long as your links are of a high quality.

When looking at the numbers, you should consider two things:

• How many backlinks are there in general?
• How many referral domains link to your site?

Ideally, you want to have more referring domains than your SEO competitors (the websites you want to outrank). You should also calculate the links:referral domains ratio – again, there’s no one rule that determines what it should be, but as long as it’s not too high (which could indicate that the links aren’t natural), you are fine.

3. Analyze Your Anchor Diversity

After getting through the numbers, it’s time to look into context. There are, in general, three types of anchors that you can find:

• Naked URLs – Links that aren’t placed on a text but display the URL itself, for instance: https://linkhouse.net/.
• Brand anchors – Links that are placed on the name of your brand.
• Keyword anchors – Links that are placed on certain keywords that the linked page is targeting.

Again, there is no one clear ratio that you should follow here, but your backlink profile needs to be diverse if you want to position high. You should, therefore, be very careful with keyword anchors – although they can be really strong, directing exactly the traffic you want to your website, too many of them might cause Google to penalize you, as it is an indicator that you’re boosting your backlink profile artificially.

4. Understand Backlink Velocity

You can buy backlinks on numerous platforms, so why don’t you do it once for a large sum of money and then forget about your backlink profile for the next year or two? Because this would also be seen as spammy by Google.

That’s why you have to analyze your backlink velocity when looking into your backlink profile. This will tell you how many inbound links you can actually acquire each month without the risk of being penalized by Google. Additionally, if your ranks have recently dropped, a too-high backlink velocity might be the cause, and analyzing it will help you detect that.

5. Backlink Quality

While, in general, the more backlinks you have, the better your positions in SERPs should be, it’s not always the case. Low-quality backlinks often do more harm than good, so your backlink profile analysis should include an evaluation of your current inbound links – sometimes, it’s just better to remove certain links for the sake of ranking up.

What should you look into when evaluating the quality? Namely:

• topical relevance,
• domain authority and page authority of the linking page,
• anchor text,
• type of backlink.

6. Make Conclusions and Prepare Your SEO Strategy

Having analyzed all of that, you can come up with a strategy on how to improve your backlink profile. Sometimes, it might include determining your optimal link acquisition velocity for the next months; at other times, it might mean removing low-quality links and getting more high-quality ones. Nevertheless, you have to forge your findings into a well-developed link building strategy.

How to Build a Strong Backlink Profile?

We’ve tackled it a bit in the analysis section of this article, but let’s get into more detail and talk about building a strong backlink profile. How to do it effectively? Use our link building platform – here are a few tips on how to do it!

1. Get Relevant Backlinks with Topical Backlinks Module

High-quality backlinks are those that come from authoritative websites that are relevant to your content. Thus, to build a strong backlink profile that will make your site rank high in search engines, you have to start with topical relevance.

For that, you can use our topical backlinks module – a tool that lets you find linking opportunities from websites or subpages with high authority based on the keywords of your choice. This way, you can quickly purchase the most high-quality links for your site, spending just a few minutes on finding them!

2. Plan Your Campaigns Carefully with Our Link Planner

How to build a strong backlink profile? You must take link velocity into account. As mentioned before, you could purchase thousands of links at once, but this wouldn’t do much good for your site – even if all those backlinks wouldn’t be toxic, Google would still mark such a big acquisition as a spammy practice.

This is why you need to plan your campaigns thoroughly, and our backlinks planner is the ideal tool to help you with that. With it, you can set up recurring campaigns for months to come and buy backlinks from our marketplace regularly without worrying about acquiring too many links at once.

3. Find out the Opportunities You Miss out on with Backlink Gap

Another key aspect of building a strong backlink profile is ensuring a decent link:domain ratio. But, sometimes, finding new domains seems hard, doesn’t it? That’s why we recommend looking into your competition.

With our backlink gap module, you’ll be able to quickly analyze your SEO competitors and discover what referral domains they acquired that you did not. Additionally, you’ll be provided with offers to those domains that are available at our link marketplace so that you can quickly purchase links from the missing sites and improve your link:referral domain ratio.

The Takeaway

Building a strong backlink profile is crucial if you want to achieve high positions in search engine rankings. As it is a constant process – you’ll find broken links that need replacement and new ones coming that you’ll have to monitor (and eliminate if they are toxic). Therefore, you should analyze your backlink profile regularly and adjust your strategies based on the findings – something you can do easily.

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