If you want to succeed with SEO, you need a strong backlink profile. This ideally is a list or compilation of all the backlinks—or inbound links—that point to your website.
A good backlink profile should be highly qualitative and not necessarily quantitative. But how do you know the difference between good and bad backlinks when auditing your site?
In this article, we’ll take you through what it takes to build a strong backlink profile and some of the strategies that are helping us at Legiit to build a diverse and authoritative link portfolio that makes us dominate SERPs.
With that in mind, let’s get started.
What is a Backlink Profile and Why Is It Important For SEO?
A backlink profile is a list of all links from other websites on your site. It should be able to show you which link you have and where it is coming from. Here are some of the factors we use to rate and categorize backlinks in a profile:
- The domain authority of the linking site
- Relevance
- Type, and
- Anchor text ratio for the backlinks
Why is a link profile important?
It is important to have profile links for your website because backlinks are a major ranking factor established by Google and other search engines. Therefore, knowing what your site has (backlink profile) allows you to keep up to speed with the performance of your business on the SERPs.
That’s because, a healthy and robust link in profile normally sends a positive signal to Google, indicating that your website can be trusted and is therefore worthy of ranking. Here, you need to focus on building high-quality backlinks and not plenty of backlinks that don’t make sense to Google.
Ultimately, the better your site is ranking the more the traffic, sales, revenue, and so on.
As we mentioned in the introduction to this article, not all backlinks that will appear on your backlink profile are good—some are bad. But how do you identify that?
What Is a Good Backlink Profile?
First, let’s look at what makes a backlink portfolio good.
#1. High Authority Backlinks
The reason why we recommend this kind of backlinks is their ability to pass higher PageRank value to your target site—and you can only achieve this if you have a good number of links from websites with high domain authority and trust.
#2. Relevant Backlinks
You need genuine links from sites that are relevant to your site if you want to move the needle. In other words, having a good number of backlinks from relevant sites acts as a vote of confidence to your site that signals Google algorithms that your content can be trusted and is helpful, therefore it deserves to rank.
#3. Variety of Link Types
Sometimes when your website has a mix of high-quality and low-quality links, it’s a good indicator that your website has a natural backlink profile. However, you should be wary of having more low-quality backlinks compared to high-quality backlinks. That’s because they can be harmful to your SEO.
Such links include:
- Dofollow links
- Nofollow links
- Editorial links
- Edu profile backlinks
- Acknowledgments
- Image links, etc.
Next…
#4. No Link Spam Schemes
If your site does not have toxic backlinks, spammy backlinks, and other links built from link schemes, it’s a good indicator that you have a good backlink portfolio. That’s important because, as it stands, Google is at the peak of removing low-value backlinks.
#5. Good Backlink Anchor Text Ratio
Last but not least, if your backlink profile shows that you have a good distribution of anchor texts for the links, it’s a good indicator of a healthy profile.
For example, a good backlink profile for the homepage should consist of:
- 80-95% branded, natural, or URL anchor text
- 10% with the keyword phrase mixed with the anchor, and
- 5% with exact match keywords in the backlink
Conversely, as for the internal pages, a good ratio for anchor text includes:
- 35-45% branded, natural, or URL anchor text
- 50-60% with the keyword phrase mixed with the anchor, and
- 10% exact match keywords in the backlink
How can I improve my backlink profile?
Focus on the following areas:
- Links from niche-relevant and high-authority sites
- Backlinks from lots of unique and high-quality sites, and
- Avoid link schemes like plague
What Is a Bad Backlink Profile?
As for a bad backlink profile, it’s the flip side of the above points. Let’s summarize them below:
- Backlinks from non-relevant sites
- Similar types of backlinks
- Links built from link building schemes
- Bad backlink anchor text ratio
- Zero to few high authority backlinks
This brings us to the question—how can you tell whether your backlink profile is good or bad?
How do I get a backlink profile?
Most of the things we’ve discussed above cannot be done with plain eyes or microscopic eyes for that matter.
You need to have an aid of SEO tools—and there is a variety to choose from—but at Legiit, we use the Legiit GMSD dashboard backlink history.
As you can see, this tool not only allows you to view your backlink profile but also audit it. For example, you can see what’s your referring domain, status, follow or nofollow, anchor text, and date added or discovered by Google on Google Search Console.
These factors are important when auditing your site for backlinks. But there are a lot more, let’s take a look in the next section.
How To Analyze a Backlink Profile
#1. Analyze the Number of Referring Domains
Just like in the attached screenshot above from our GMSD dashboard backlink history, you need to begin by checking the number of incoming links for the website.
Be keen on the total number of unique domains because that’s what makes the count. For example, you may have 1000 backlinks from the same domain, while that adds up to your backlink profile, it does not necessarily add value to your PageRank compared to such links, but from multiple unique sites.
#2. Check the Total Number of Backlinks
After looking at the referring domains, you can also check the total number of backlinks that make up your profile.
When evaluating your growth, you can assess against this background. For example, if you have 500 backlinks today and tomorrow they increase by 10, you can say your backlink profile is growing.
But we have to stress what we covered in the first metric above—a total number of unique domains and these domains need to be quality links.
#3. Inspect the Anchor Text Variation
The next step when analyzing your backlink profile is to look at your anchor text variation. This will help you discover whether any overused anchor texts may lead to penalization by Google due to overoptimization.
Ideally, here is the standard measurement that you can use for a healthy backlink profile.
A good backlink profile for the homepage should consist of:
- 80-95% branded, natural, or URL anchor text
- 10% with the keyword phrase mixed with the anchor, and
- 5% with exact match keywords in the backlink
Internal pages:
- 35-45% branded, natural, or URL anchor text
- 50-60% with the keyword phrase mixed with the anchor, and
- 10% exact match keywords in the backlink
For example, on the site, we’re analyzing, we have a couple of anchor texts that show some sort of diversity and that’s what we’re talking about.
If you realize that you’re over-optimizing for certain anchor texts, you can easily pitch back to the webmasters and ask them to change to a different but relevant anchor text.
#4. Analyze Backlink Velocity (Freshness)
Another important metric to look at is the freshness of your backlinks. At what speed are you getting fresh backlinks added to your site? Check the dates and keep track over time to establish your link velocity.
A big spike in backlinks tells you that your content is performing better and is helpful that’s why a lot of websites are linking to you and the opposite is correct.
#5. Type of Links
We talked about this previously. You need to check the backlinks variations that your site has. For example, are they follow or nofollow backlinks? Auditing your site against this factor allows you to know your standing.
That’s because not all links are created equal. For example, dofollow backlinks allow the search engine to send crawlers through the link while nofollow links do not.
#6. Check Backlink Quality
Last but not least, you need quality backlinks from authoritative sites to pass the PageRank and subsequently be able to rank and perform better on the SERPs.
If you only get links from low-score sites, that is an indication that your site is getting spammy links which might not be good for your SEO.
How to Create Profile Backlinks?
There are a couple of strategies that you can use to build a robust and qualitative link profile for your site.
These are the strategies that we covered extensively in our article The Art of Link Building Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Backlinks for Website Growth and Visibility but we’ll summarize them here for you.
They include:
(i). Guest Blogging
(ii). Fixing Broken Links
(iii). Link Reclamation
(iv). Creating Linkable Assets
(v). Content Promotion
(vi). The Skyscraper Content
(vii). Repurpose Your Content
(viii). Community site link building
(ix). Help a Reporter Out
The good thing about these strategies is that they’re easy to do (even if you’re a beginner) and if you follow them to the end, you can end up with authoritative links and if you repeat the process again and again, you can have a diverse profile link.
Sounds awesome? That’s what we do at Legiit.
Final Thoughts
Let’s wrap it up. You are here because you want to grow your profile link building and dominate the SERPs.
To have a strong backlink profile, you need to ensure that you first understand what it is, its relevance in SEO, and what you can do to expand your backlink profile.
In this article, we’ve discussed some of the key metrics to use when auditing your backlink profile and the #1 backlink analysis software that we’ve developed and used here at Legiit.
It’s now up to you to go out and give your site a fresh look by auditing and building your backlink portfolio.
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