Perfect Search’s Guide to Backlinks, Site Health, & Page Authority

Having a fine-tuned backlink profile is an important part of maintaining site health while establishing domain and page authority. This is an often overlooked aspect of SEO that should not be discounted. 

From reviewing your backlinks to finding linking opportunities, optimizing your backlink profile is a great way to increase your authoritativeness and credibility in the eyes of Google.

What is a backlink profile?

Your backlink profile is essentially the combination of every external webpage that links to yours. These could come from various sources such as news articles, citations, brand mentions, profiles, and more. If your site has been linked anywhere else on the internet, this will be included in your backlink profile.

Google views your backlink profile as endorsements for your site. The more legitimate and credible your backlinks are, the more trustworthy your site will be in the eyes of Google. The quality of your backlinks is more important than the quantity, but having a robust backlink profile often includes a mix of quantity while respecting quality.

Since your backlink profile largely relies on other websites to link to yours, there is a certain lack of control in this element of SEO as it is considered off-site. However, Google provides you with the tools to disavow spammy, harmful, or low-quality backlinks and remove them from your profile.

Performing a backlink review

Reviewing your backlink portfolio involves pulling all domains that link to your site and determining if they are spammy, harmful, or untrustworthy in nature. Many SEO tools offer the ability to pull your backlink profile and also assign a trustworthiness or spamminess score. By reviewing the lowest scores first, you are able to have the largest impact on your overall backlink profile. 

If a site is spammy or harmful, add it to a disavow list to upload to Google Search Console’s disavow tool. As you are reviewing the different pages, you’ll want to make sure you are weeding out any spam, fake, or harmful sites. However, it’s important to use discernment when disavowing backlinks, as getting rid of legitimate backlinks that may have a low score can hurt your domain authority.

For example, if you are an online arts and crafts store, your backlink profile may consist of high-quality, high-score backlinks such as those from crafting publications, magazines etc. However, you may also have links from smaller craft blogs that may have low scores. 

Though these sites have low authority scores, they are still considered highly relevant to your site and disavowing them could harm your overall score. Thus, when reviewing your backlink profile, you should make sure that each site you disavow has legitimate reasoning to do so.

Once you are done, you can upload your disavow list to Google Search Console’s Disavow tool to send the signals to Google that you do not recognize those backlinks as legitimate. 

Backlink profile reviews should be done on a quarterly basis to ensure that no new harmful links pop up and that your backlink profile is in optimal shape.

Identifying backlinking opportunities

Another aspect of reviewing your backlink profile is identifying opportunities for backlink creation. This could be done on domains like Quora and Reddit as well as identifying local or relevant publications. Find opportunities to create content that is helpful for users and has a link to your site without being overly salesy. 

These new content opportunities are a way for you to add high-quality backlinks to your profile and boost your site’s legitimacy in the eyes of Google. 

Working with an SEO team that is specialized in reviewing backlink profiles and identifying opportunities will ensure that your backlink profile is robust and fine-tuned. 

If you’re looking for a team of SEO experts to help you with your backlinks, look no more! Contact us to get a comprehensive audit of your site and backlink profile.