5 Signs Your Website Needs a Backlink Audit

If you’re seeing a sudden drop in your website traffic, it might mean it’s time to conduct an audit of your backlink profile.

Of course, a drop in traffic is just one of the signs your website needs a backlink audit. Others include manual action notifications from Google, major website redesigns, an abundance of irrelevant linking URLs, and unnatural or suspicious anchor text.

If you don’t audit your backlink profile, each of those problems will likely just get worse. That’s why it’s essential to know which warning signs to look out for. Fortunately, that’s precisely what we’ll cover on this page. Keep on reading for more information!

5 signs your website needs a backlink audit

Judging when to do a backlink audit is a lot easier if you know what to look for. That’s why we’ll be looking at five of the most significant backlink audit signals to watch out for, including:

1. A sudden drop in rankings or traffic
2. A manual action notification in Google Search Console
3. A major website redesign or restructure
4. A rise in irrelevant linking URLs
5. Unnatural or suspicious anchor text

Let’s look at each of those in more detail.

1. A sudden drop in rankings or traffic

The first backlink audit signal to watch out for is a sudden drop in search rankings or site traffic. This could indicate that your site has been hit with a penalty from Google due to a poor backlink profile.

Backlink penalties happen because Google only wants to rank high-integrity sites. Backlinks serve as a “vote of confidence” for those sites, but Google wants to ensure that they’re legitimate — so they penalize sites that appear to be buying or otherwise manipulating backlinks.

If Google believes that’s the case for your site, you’ll notice a big drop in rankings, which is your first warning sign that something’s up with your profile — and shows that you should do an audit as soon as possible.

2. A manual action notification in Google Search Console

Sometimes, Google will notify you directly if it notices issues with your backlink profile.

When Google detects any unnatural linking patterns in relation to your site, you might receive a manual action notification in Google Search Console, which will tell you what the issue is and give you a specific action item to resolve it.

If that happens, you should obviously start by resolving the action item Google gives you. After that, however, it’s likely worth doing a full backlink audit to see if there are any other actions you need to take to fix your backlink profile.

3. A major website redesign or restructure

It’s also probably worth conducting a backlink audit if you recently made any major redesigning, restructuring, or rebranding efforts on your website. Those types of large-scale site changes can often result in page removals or broken links, which will naturally hurt your backlink profile.

That means even when you don’t immediately notice a negative impact, it’s probably still a good idea to follow up every significant website overhaul with at least a basic backlink audit to make sure nothing was messed up in the process.  

4. A rise in irrelevant linking URLs

Keep an eye on the links leading to your website. If you notice a rise in irrelevant linking URLs — such as foreign-language pages, low-authority sites, or unrelated industries — that’s a red flag, and can be an indication of when to do a backlink audit. This can also show up as a sudden spike in new backlinks — a common indicator of a negative SEO attack.

Backlinks help communicate to Google what your site is about, and if a lot of your backlinks are coming from irrelevant sites, it’ll mess up the topics that Google associates your site with. If you run a construction company and you’re getting a bunch of links from a clothing website, that’s a problem.

5. Unnatural or suspicious anchor text

Even if the backlinks themselves are coming from seemingly relevant websites, the anchor text being used for them might still indicate that a backlink audit is needed.

Anchor text that excessively relies on keyword stuffing or money-focused phrases like “cheap payday loans” can indicate that your backlink profile is either over-optimized or outright spammy. That’s likely going to result in a penalty from Google, so it’s good to catch that issue early so you can nip it in the bud.

How to fix a poor backlink profile

We’ve now seen the major signs your website needs a backlink audit — but the question is, what do you do once you find one or more of those signs? The answer is, you go through the following steps:

1. Conduct your backlink audit
2. Restore broken pages or use redirects
3. Request removals and disavow toxic backlinks

Here’s some more information about each of those steps.

1. Conduct your backlink audit

When you find backlink audit signals on your website, the first step is — of course — to conduct the backlink audit itself. To do that, you should:

• Analyze all the domains linking to your website
• Filter your list of linking domains to find the spammy ones
• Look for broken or missing pages across your site
• Check your competitors’ backlink profiles to see what they’re doing differently

You can conduct most of these steps with tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and our SEO checker. The goal of your audit is to pinpoint any potential issues that might be hurting your backlink profile. Once you’ve done that, you can move on to the following steps.

2. Restore broken pages or use redirects

The first thing you should do after conducting a backlink audit is fix any backlink issues that originate on your own website. That typically means repairing broken or missing pages that other sites might be trying to link to.

There are two main ways you can handle that. The first is to repair, restore, or replace those pages. The second is to leave the pages taken down, but redirect from their URLs to other pages on your site. Both of these methods ensure that backlinks leading to those pages don’t take users to a 404 error page.

3. Request removals and disavow toxic backlinks

The final step is to address any toxic backlinks — such as those from spammy or irrelevant websites — that might be leading to your own site. Start by reaching out to those websites and politely requesting that they remove the backlinks.

For the sites that don’t respond to your request, though, you can disavow backlinks via the Google Disavow Tool. This essentially tells Google to ignore the links coming from those websites so that they don’t factor into your backlink profile.

That said, Google’s algorithms are increasingly good at ignoring low-quality links on their own, so the Disavow Tool is generally best reserved for situations where you’ve received a manual action penalty, rather than routine maintenance.

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Get help repairing your backlink profile with WebFX

Optimizing your backlink profile can be time-consuming, and sometimes it can be tricky to figure out when to do a backlink audit at all, as well as how to fix the issues you find. Of course, it helps if you have the right tools. Our SEO checker can give you some insight into how your backlink profile is doing, as well as other areas of your SEO.

And if you want some professional help repairing your backlink profile, we can help with that, too. Just get in touch with us about our SEO services by calling us at 888-601-5359 or contacting us online today!