Common Marketing & SEO Checklist SEO best practices and guidance to help your website perform online.

Why Audit and Analyze Your Existing Links is important for your website and SEO

Conducting periodical link audits will help you in two ways:

• Thanks to Google’s Penguin algorithm, it’s absolutely necessary for you to find and remove low quality links to your site. A profile full of links from low quality websites or links with overly optimized, keyword-rich anchor text can make your page look bad to Google. It could even result in a manual penalty or, for the worst offenders, deindexing. Keep on top of your backlinks to avoid any possible bad outcomes.
• Knowing who already finds your site and/or content worth linking to is very valuable when planning your future content and link building efforts. Focus on content types and topics that have proven popular with your audience to maximize your link baiting abilities. People who have already linked to you represent some of the best targets when building your outreach lists.

How to Audit and Analyze Your Existing Links.

You can export your links yourself from Google Search Console in the Search Traffic section, or you can use a tool like Majestic or Ahrefs to find and export your links. Some people use all three and then dedupe the list to make sure they are using the most robust data set possible.When analyzing your links, again, you can do it manually by looking at anchor text, IP address, page content and Trust and Citation Flows (if you’re using Majestic) or upload your links to a tool such as Kerboo that will score your links for you. While evaluating your links, take this opportunity to note any patterns with anchor text and page content.While rare, negative SEO does happen and usually appears as repeated anchor text and content. Once you’ve evaluated your links, attempt to have the low quality links removed or, failing that, use the disavow tool in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Some useful resources and external links for tips regarding SEO & Marketing Strategies

• Dedicated link monitoring tools: Link Explorer, Majestic, Ahrefs
• Google Disavow Tool