How to Do a Backlink Audit: Evaluate and Clean Up Your Link Profile

Plenty of sites accumulate backlinks for years without ever looking at where those links come from, who is sending them, or whether any of them are quietly undermining rankings. By the time a manual action lands or traffic drops without explanation, the cleanup is significantly harder than it would have been six months earlier. A regular backlink audit catches problems early and, more importantly, shows you exactly where your link profile is strong and where it leaves you exposed to competitors.

This guide walks through how to do a backlink audit methodically: what to pull, what to measure, what to act on, and what to leave alone.

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What a Backlink Audit Actually Measures

A backlink audit is a structured review of every external site linking to your domain. The goal is not simply to find bad links and remove them. It is to understand the full shape of your link profile: where authority is concentrated, which pages attract links, what anchor text patterns look like, and how your profile compares to competing domains.

Most audits fail because they treat the exercise as purely defensive. Teams spend hours flagging low-DR links and filing disavow requests while ignoring the more valuable output: a gap analysis that shows which high-authority links your competitors have that you do not. The cleanup is a small part of the work. The strategic read is where the return comes from.

The Four Dimensions Worth Measuring

• Quantity: Total backlinks and referring domains. Referring domains matter more than raw link count because ten links from one site carry less weight than one link each from ten different sites. See our breakdown of referring domains vs backlinks and which metric predicts rankings better.
• Quality: Domain Rating (or Domain Authority, depending on your toolset), organic traffic of the linking page, and whether the linking site itself has a clean link profile.
• Relevance: Does the linking site operate in a topically related space? A link from a high-DR domain in an unrelated niche carries less topical authority than one from a mid-DR site in your exact vertical.
• Anchor text distribution: A healthy profile shows a mix of branded anchors, naked URLs, generic phrases, and a smaller proportion of exact-match keyword anchors. A profile dominated by exact-match anchors is a flag, particularly if those links were built in a short window.

Tools to Pull Your Backlink Data

No single crawler indexes every backlink on the web. Running your audit through two tools and cross-referencing the output gives you a more complete picture than relying on one source alone.

The three tools used most frequently for this work are Ahrefs Site Explorer, Semrush Backlink Analytics, and Google Search Console. Each has a different index and different strengths.

How the Tools Differ in Practice

Start with Search Console's Links report to export the domains Google acknowledges. Then pull the full referring domain list from Ahrefs or Semrush. Discrepancies between what Google reports and what third-party tools report are normal and usually reflect crawl lag rather than a problem worth investigating.

For a broader look at monitoring options, our guide to backlink monitoring tools for US SEO teams covers the main platforms in more detail.

How to Do a Backlink Audit: The Step-by-Step Process

Step 1: Export Your Full Referring Domain List

In Ahrefs, go to Site Explorer, enter your domain, and navigate to Referring Domains. Export the full list as a CSV. Filter for dofollow links first, since these pass PageRank. Note the total count and the DR distribution: what proportion of your referring domains sit above DR 40, between DR 20 and 40, and below DR 20.

There is no universal rule that says low-DR links are toxic. Many legitimate local directories, niche blogs, and newly launched publications have low DR scores. The DR alone does not tell you whether a link is harmful.

Step 2: Audit Your Anchor Text Profile

In the same tool, pull the Anchors report. Look for three things:

• What percentage of anchors are exact-match keywords versus branded or generic phrases?
• Are there anchor texts that contain keywords you have never targeted, which could indicate links placed without your knowledge?
• Is there a sudden spike in a particular anchor cluster, which might suggest a negative SEO attack or an old link-building campaign that has aged badly?

A well-earned link profile tends to be anchor-diverse. When branded anchors make up the majority and exact-match anchors sit below roughly 10 to 15 percent of the total, the profile looks natural. Profiles where exact-match anchors dominate draw manual reviewer attention, particularly in competitive niches where manipulative link building is common.

Step 3: Score Each Referring Domain for Quality

Rather than flagging every low-DR domain as a problem, assess quality using a short checklist for each domain in question:

• Does the site have real content written by identifiable people?
• Does it receive organic traffic (visible in Ahrefs or Semrush)?
• Is the link on a page topically related to the content it links to?
• Is the site part of a network (identical templates, shared IP blocks, repetitive anchor patterns across dozens of outbound links)?

Links that fail three or four of these checks warrant further attention. Links that fail only the DR threshold but pass the rest are almost always harmless.

Step 4: Run a Competitor Gap Analysis

This is the step most audit guides skip, and it is often the most valuable output. In Ahrefs, use the Link Intersect tool. Enter two or three competing domains alongside your own. The report shows referring domains that link to your competitors but not to you. These are pre-qualified link prospects: sites that have already demonstrated willingness to link to content in your space.

Prioritize prospects by DR, by topical relevance, and by whether the competitor's linked page is a resource you can match or improve. This output feeds directly into your acquisition pipeline. See our backlink strategy guide for how to structure the outreach that follows.

When to Disavow (and When to Leave It Alone)

At Indexed, we still use the disavow file, but we set a high bar before we touch it. The scenarios that justify a disavow submission are a confirmed manual action from Google, evidence of an active negative SEO campaign sending large volumes of spammy links, or a historical link-building campaign that used clearly manipulative tactics at scale (paid links with exact-match anchors, links from known link farms, or private blog network footprints).

What does not justify a disavow is a list of low-DR domains that a tool has flagged as "toxic" based on automated scoring. Google's own link spam guidance makes clear that the search engine is designed to ignore links it considers low quality rather than penalize sites for receiving them. Filing a disavow for links Google is already ignoring achieves nothing and risks accidentally disavowing legitimate links if the file is built carelessly.

The practical test we use: if you received a manual action notice in Search Console, disavow is part of the reconsideration request. If you did not, the bar for touching the file is very high. For a deeper look at identifying and removing genuinely harmful links, our guide to toxic backlinks, disavow, and recovery covers the process in full.

Reading the Audit as an Authority Gap Report

An audit that ends with "here are the links to remove" has stopped too early. The more durable output is a clear picture of where your domain sits relative to competitors and what it would take to close the gap.

One of our clients, an immigration tech business, illustrated this clearly. When Indexed ran the initial SEO audit, the domain had effectively zero backlink profile despite having hundreds of well-structured programmatic pages covering visa types across 15 countries. The technical foundation was already strong, with a perfect health score and clean architecture. The bottleneck was authority: the site ranked for nothing because no referring domains were signaling trust to Google. Over two months, a focused link-building campaign across relevant immigration, travel, and education sites grew referring domains from 179 to 353 and took Domain Rating from 0 to 24. You can read the full case study for the breakdown. The audit did not just find problems. It identified exactly what needed to be built.

That reframe matters. An audit is not a cleanup exercise. It is a diagnostic that tells you which links you have, which links your competitors have that you do not, and therefore where link acquisition effort will return the most authority per placement.

FAQ

What is included in an SEO audit?

A full SEO audit covers technical health (crawlability, indexing, page speed, structured data), on-page factors (title tags, headings, content quality), internal link architecture, and the backlink profile. A backlink audit is one component of a wider SEO audit rather than a standalone exercise. In practice, the backlink component is often run separately on a recurring basis while technical and on-page audits follow a less frequent schedule.

Are backlinks still relevant in 2026?

Yes. Google's own documentation continues to describe links as one of the key signals used to assess relevance and authority. The weighting and the way Google interprets link quality has evolved significantly over the past decade, but the fundamental role of links as trust signals between sites has not changed. What has changed is the bar for quality: a small number of genuinely relevant, editorially placed links from real publications consistently outperforms a large volume of low-quality placements.

How do you do a competitor backlink analysis?

Enter a competing domain into Ahrefs Site Explorer or Semrush Backlink Analytics and export their referring domain list. Filter for dofollow links and sort by DR. Then use the Link Intersect or Backlink Gap tool to compare their profile against your own. The output shows domains linking to them but not to you. Those are your highest-priority link prospects because the site has already demonstrated willingness to link to content in your space. Repeating this process across three or four competitors gives you a prospect list that is both pre-qualified and prioritized by domain strength.

How to do a backlink audit when you have limited tool access?

Start with Google Search Console, which is free. Under Links, export your top linking sites and your top linked pages. This gives you Google's own view of your profile. Cross-reference with the free tier of Ahrefs or Semrush for quality scoring on the most prominent referring domains. The free tiers are limited in export depth, but for a first audit on a smaller domain they provide enough data to identify obvious problems, map anchor text patterns, and prioritize the highest-value referring domains for relationship building. As the domain grows, investing in a paid tool subscription returns more data depth and more reliable competitor gap analysis.

Your First Steps This Week

If you have never run a backlink audit before, the starting point is simpler than most guides suggest. Open Google Search Console and download the Links export. Note your top linking domains and your most-linked pages. If the top-linked page is your homepage and nothing else has more than a handful of referring domains, that is the first gap to address.

Next, run your domain through a free version of Ahrefs or Semrush and look at the anchor text report. If any anchor cluster looks unusual, make a note of the domains sending those anchors and assess them manually using the quality checklist above. Only proceed to disavow if you find a clear pattern of manipulative links or receive a manual action from Search Console.

Finally, run a competitor gap report against your two closest organic competitors. Export the domains linking to them but not to you, filter for DR above 30, and add the most topically relevant ones to a prospect list. That list is the foundation of your next link-building push. The audit and the acquisition plan should be built together, not treated as separate projects. If you want support running a full audit and translating the output into a link acquisition strategy, contact the Indexed team to discuss your domain.

Related Reading

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