Every link counts—but the difference comes in whether it is a useful or useless link.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to ensure you’re managing your backlinks to maintain the health of your website.
This isn’t just about throwing an eye into your backlinks and hoping for the best. It’s about strategically auditing your backlinks from time to time to make meaningful decisions that will help your business.
But where do you start? In this article, we’ll take you through a complete guide (that we use) to efficiently manage our backlinks. It’s about:
- Tools
- Techniques
- Tips, and everything you need to know to get ahead
At the end of the day, you should maximize the value and impact of your links.
Ready to learn? Let’s do this.
What is Link Management?
Let’s go back briefly and talk about an article we covered about Strategies for Developing a Diverse and Authoritative Link Portfolio.
We said a backlink profile is a list of all links your site has together with important metrics such as link quality and so on.
Now, what we didn’t say or did not come out clearly in that article is that for you to create a strong backlink profile, you need to do link management.
…that’s what this section is all about.
Link management is a very important part of your SEO campaigns. It involves the following:
- Organizing
- Monitoring, and
- Optimizing the links
Why is this even important? In the past, all you needed was backlinks, and could dominate your niche. Today, Google is leaning towards the quality and value of your backlinks rather than quantity and spammy backlinks.
That’s why you need to efficiently manage your backlink profile to ensure you have links that make the difference for your SEO campaign and so on.
There are two other goals here:
- Build a solid foundation for your SEO by ensuring that your backlink profile is healthy and aligned with search engine guidelines.
- Leverage the power of backlinks to drive targeted organic traffic to your website, rank, and establish your authority within your industry.
Next.
Key Components of Backlink Management
In this section, we will look at the backlink management process. We’ve designed it systematically—from cradle to grave kind of process for ease of understanding and implementation.
1. Link Acquisition
The process of backlink management tracks first to the how of acquiring backlinks for your site.
You need to ask yourself the following questions:
#1. What’s the Domain Rating and Domain Authority of your linking website?
#2. How or what tactic are you using to acquire these backlinks? Is it from:
- Creating valuable content
- Reaching out to relevant websites for guest posting opportunities, or
- Building relationships with industry influencers
The idea here is to ensure that you understand where your links are coming from or you’re getting links from reputable sites only.
Next.
2. Link Analysis
The second step is to analyze the quality and relevancy of your links. This also closely ties with the #1. step above because it involves looking at the following factors:
- Authority of the linking website
- The context and anchor text used in the link, and
- Overall relevance of the linking page to your content
Next.
3. Link Monitoring
It’s always a good idea to regularly assess your links to check if there are any changes or issues with them.
For example, you can build a clean link today, but tomorrow you find the site has been pulled down. If you continue to have the links on your site, they may end up hurting your SEO.
The other factors you need to monitor include:
- Keeping track of new backlinks acquired
- Detecting any lost or broken links, and
- Monitoring changes in the quality or authority of the linking websites.
4. Link Optimization
This is the link to the “treatment” process and is perhaps the most important in the whole link management campaign. The goal here is to improve the quality and effectiveness of your backlinks.
This is what you can do in this section:
- Fix broken links
- Disavowing toxic backlinks or spammy links
- Optimizing anchor text to enhance relevance and click-through rates.
5. Have a Solid Link Building Strategy
Last but not least, you need to have a solid link building strategy. In this article we’ve outlined some of the key and outstanding tactics you can use to inform your link building:
- Identifying target websites
- Creating valuable content to attract backlinks, and
- Actively seeking opportunities to acquire high-quality links through outreach.
Why is this whole process important and why do it? Let’s take a look at that in the next section.
The Importance of Backlink Management in 2024
There are a couple of reasons why managing your backlink profile is important—and we’ve captured that in our previous articles about link building. Here is why it’s important to manage your backlinks:
#1. Better Search Engine Rankings
One thing about backlinks is that you almost have zero control over the links you get. However, when you manage your profile, you ensure that your site has diverse and high-quality backlinks that can boost your search rankings—than your competitors who might not be doing that.
#2. Protection from Penalties
In the past, anyone could build links from any sort of scheme. Today, it’s a different process. Google and other search engines have been updating their algorithms which detect and penalize sites with manipulative backlinks. Such penalties include:
- A drop in search rankings
- Complete removal from search results
If you figure out your site has such links, you can remove them and avoid such penalties.
Other reasons include:
- Increased organic traffic
- Establishing authority and trust
- Competitive advantage
- Improved user experience
- Identifying high-quality backlinks
- Detecting and fixing lost or broken backlinks
- Stay ahead of negative SEO attacks
- Tracking the impact of backlinks
Awesome.
Up to that point, we’ve covered everything about why you need to manage your backlinks, their significance, and their benefits to your site and yourself…but…since this venture is a difficult one to undertake, we have a few tips that you can follow to make the work easier.
Let’s check out.
Tips to Manage Your Backlinks Effectively
In this section, we’ll take a look at effective tips to help you manage your backlinks and maximize their impact on your SEO.
#1. Check Your Spam Score
A high spam score for a site doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is spammy, but it’s a sign that you should do some more investigation into the quality and relevance of the site.
However, as you build your links, you should note that a score of 61%-100% is considered a high spam score—that needs to be looked into.
#2. Monitor Lost Backlinks
You need to ensure that you regularly audit your backlink profile for any lost or broken links.
You can do this daily or at an established timeframe—this is because the sooner you can discover an issue with your backlinks the sooner you can resolve it.
#3. Add Alerts for Lost and Broken Backlinks Tracking
You need to subscribe to services that let you know when your site loses a backlink. This will help you address the issues and reduce any possibility of harming your SEO.
#4. Check the Trust Flow and Citation Flow
Trust flow measures the quality and authority of the linking domain, while citation flow represents the number of backlinks.
You need to regularly check this feature to ensure that you’re only building links from trustworthy and relevant sources.
#5. Track the Dofollow and Nofollow Ratio of Your Backlinks
It’s always a good idea to check the ratio of dofollow and nofollow backlinks in your link profile.
This is because having an excessive percentage of either of the links may appear unnatural to search engines leading to penalization.
#6. Always Evaluate the Impact of Your Backlinks
Don’t just go out on a link building campaign without regularly assessing whether those links are adding any value to your site.
For example, you need to track your referral traffic and engagement to establish which links are driving traffic that leads to conversions. You can in turn focus on building such links or links from those sources only.
#7. Disavow Links From Spammy or Low Quality Sites
Doing this regularly helps you maintain a clean link profile and tells Google to ignore such links when crawling through your link profile—thereby avoiding unnecessary penalties.
#8. Monitor Your Competitor’s Backlinks
Competition is everywhere. In fact in SEO, it’s even more lethal. That’s why you need to spy on the link profiles of your competitors to find out sources which you were not building links from (that are useful to you) and replicate the same strategy.
Lastly, it’s important to use the data and insight you gain from managing your backlinks to inform your SEO campaign(s). Additionally, you need to keep abreast with industry trends and news so that you can gain a competitive advantage.
That’s a wrap. Let’s take a look at the last section of this guide.
Useful Tools for Backlink Management
To effectively manage your backlinks, you need backlink management tools that gather insights and optimize your backlink profile.
For example, if you log in to the backlink history (a top backlink management software) at the Legiit GMSD dashboard, you’ll see various variables that are key to managing your backlinks.
It allows you to monitor the following:
- Referring domain
- Status
- Whether it’s follow or nofollow
- Anchor text, and
- Date created
The other tools you can use for various other link building management include:
- Ahrefs
- Semrush backlink audit
- Sitechecker Tool
- BuzzSumo
- Majestic
When you’re using these tools, it’s always a good idea to use your intelligence to make decisions. This is because some of these tools are based on machine learning and might not be 100% accurate.
Final Thoughts
We’ve come to the end of this guide. We’ve covered useful ideas, benefits, tips, and tools that you can use to manage your backlinks effectively—and maximize the value and impact of your links.
Over to you now.
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