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

What is a backlink audit?

A backlink audit is a systematic review of every external website linking to your domain. The goal is twofold: find links that may be harming your rankings (toxic or spammy links) and identify your strongest links so you can understand what's working and replicate it.

Most sites that have been online for more than a year have a mixed backlink profile — some high-quality links from authoritative sites, and some low-quality links from directories, link farms, or irrelevant sources. An audit helps you understand the ratio and take action.

When should you do a backlink audit?

Run a backlink audit in any of these situations:

• You've seen a sudden, unexplained drop in organic traffic or rankings
• You've received a manual penalty notification in Google Search Console
• You're acquiring a website and want to understand its link health before purchase
• You're launching a new link-building campaign and want to baseline your current profile
• You haven't audited in more than 12 months

For most sites, a quarterly review is sufficient to catch problems early.

Step 1: Pull your full link profile

Start by exporting all known backlinks to your domain. Use Google Search Console (free) as your baseline — go to Links > External links > Export. For a more complete picture, also pull data from third-party tools that crawl the web independently.

No single tool has complete coverage, so cross-referencing two sources gives you a more accurate view of your full profile.

Step 2: Identify problematic links

Not all low-quality links cause harm, but the following patterns are worth flagging:

• Links from sites with no topical relevance: A payday loans site linking to your B2B software blog is a mismatch Google notices
• Links from obvious link farms or PBNs: Sites with hundreds of outbound links per page and thin, auto-generated content
• Exact-match anchor text overdose: If 40% of your links use your exact target keyword as anchor text, that's an unnatural pattern
• Links from penalised domains: Check if linking domains have had their own manual actions
• Sudden spike in links: A burst of 500 new links from low-authority sites in a week is a red flag

Work through your link list and tag each domain as clean, review, or remove.

Step 3: Find your best links

This is the part most people skip, but it's extremely valuable. Sort your links by domain authority (or similar metric) and identify your top 20–30 referring domains. For each one, ask:

• How did we earn this link? (Content they liked, a mention, a partnership?)
• Are there similar sites in the same niche we don't have links from yet?
• Can we get more links from this same domain (to other pages)?

Your best existing links are a blueprint for your future link-building strategy.

Step 4: Remove or disavow toxic links

For genuinely harmful links, you have two options:

1. Contact and request removal: Find the webmaster of the linking site and ask them to remove the link. This works in a minority of cases but is always worth trying first.
2. Disavow via Google Search Console: For links you can't get removed, create a disavow file (a plain text file listing the domains or URLs to ignore) and upload it to Search Console. Google will then ignore those links when evaluating your site.

Be conservative with disavow — only disavow links you're confident are harmful. Disavowing good links by mistake can actually hurt your rankings.

Step 5: Document and monitor

After your audit, document what you found and what actions you took. Set a reminder to review your link profile quarterly. New links appear (and disappear) constantly, and an audit is only useful if it becomes a recurring process rather than a one-off exercise.

Analyse your backlink profile with Optmizly

Optmizly's Backlink Analyser gives you a full view of your referring domains, anchor text distribution, and link quality signals — so you can spot problems and prioritise your link-building efforts from one place.

The bottom line

A backlink audit isn't glamorous, but it's one of the most impactful technical SEO tasks you can do. A single disavow of a few hundred toxic links has recovered rankings for sites that had been stagnant for years. More importantly, understanding your best links gives you a repeatable model for future link acquisition — which compounds over time.