What Is A Backlink Profile?

In the quest to grow your business online, you probably ran across the terms “backlinks” and “backlink profile”. Both are an integral part of a SEO strategy and ignoring either of the two will hurt your results.

To help you avoid such a scenario, we’ve prepared a nifty guide that will clarify the importance of backlinks and clearly explain what is a backlink profile.

Why Are Backlinks Important in SEO?

In simple terms, a backlink is a link found on one website leading to another website. For instance, if a personal blog about traveling includes a link to a restaurant’s website, this is considered a backlink to the site of the respective eating place.

Backlinks are super important as they improve your overall ranking. Search engines analyze both the quantity and the quality of the links to assess how authoritative a website is. Thus, a higher amount of backlinks will automatically up the ranking of your site.

In addition to increasing your ranking, backlinks can exponentially increase relevant traffic to your site through referral traffic, boosting your brand awareness and bringing in thousands of potential customers monthly.

Backlink Profile Explained

A backlink profile is a collection of all the backlinks leading to your website. It details the types of links, domain quality, relevance, and anchor text. You need to analyze this profile and maintain its structure in order to enhance the effectiveness of your backlink strategy.

This roughly answers the question of what is a backlink profile.

But what makes a good backlink profile?

For starters, your profile should have organic links from high-authority sites. This means it shouldn’t contain spam or spammy anchor text. Your backlinks should also come from sites relevant to your niche or the topic you’re writing about.

All of the above signals to search engines that your website is trustworthy and relevant.

Backlink Profile Practices You Should Avoid

In contrast to a backlink profile that drives results, a poorly constructed profile will contain fewer high-authority backlinks or largely links from sites that aren’t relevant to the business at hand.

Furthermore, a profile may also lack variation in the types of backlinks and contain bad anchor texts.

Unfortunately, most beginners take on a quantity-over-quality approach to backlinking, which can lead to the opposite outcome.

You should also pay close attention to link relevance. For example, if you’re selling a SaaS solution and most of your backlinks come from eCommerce websites, Google and other search engines will recognize these links as shopping links. Since there is a mismatch between the industries here, none of the eCommerce links will boost your ranking.

How To Find Your Backlink Profile?

While it’s impossible to discover each and every link pointing to your website, most SEO tools on the market allow you to see your backlink profile.

You can use SEMrush or a cheaper alternative known as Ahrefs. If you need a free tool, there’s nothing wrong with the good old Google Search Console.

Now that we clarified the basics and explained what is a backline profile, it’s time to dig deeper.

How To Analyze Your Backlink Profile

Here are the steps you can use to audit your backlink profile:

1. Evaluate The Number of Your Backlinks

Use your SEO tool of choice to get the total number of your backlinks (in Google Search Console, you can do this with the “Links Report” option).

Don’t just look at the total link count - also pay attention to the number of referring domains.

The number of links you need to improve your ranking will vary depending on the quality of the links. As we already mentioned, a high number of backlinks typically indicates an advance in search engine results pages (SERPs).

2. Assess Your Anchor Texts

A successful backlink profile necessitates a wide variety of anchor texts. Note down how much variation there is in your anchor texts.

An overuse of phrases and keywords can tank your effort as Google penalizes websites relying heavily on specific anchor texts.

3. Analyze Your Backlink Velocity

Backlink velocity is the speed at which you generate new backlinks on your site. This matters a lot as a higher backlink velocity might appear fraudulent and lead to a Google penalty.

For best results, grow your backlinks steadily over time and you’ll maintain a positive standing with Google.

4. Evaluate The Quality of Your Backlinks

It’s important to remember that the quality outweighs the quantity in your profile.

Ascertain the page authority and domain authority scores for websites linking back to your site to determine the backlink quality. You should also check the type, anchor text, and relevance.

Low-quality backlinks could be causing your subpar SERP performance so we suggest removing any link that simply isn’t a good match for your website.

5. Create a Remediation Strategy

If your analysis reveals your backlink profile is nothing to write home about, you can take further steps to remediate the issue.

Depending on the nature of the problem, you may need to eliminate spam or remove low-quality backlinks. This is relatively easy to achieve as you can attribute any of the “negative” links to nofollow to remove them from your profile effectively.

Alternatively, in case your remediation process leaves you with a low number of backlinks, it doesn’t hurt to evaluate your overarching SEO strategy. You can always implement more productive methods for building links, including writing higher-quality content and reaching out to relevant sites regarding guest posting.

Need Help With Your SEO?

Understanding what is a backlink profile is only one piece of the puzzle that is your SEO strategy. Sadly, you can build thousands of links, but without getting the basics down, you’ll constantly struggle to achieve favorable results.

This is why you should work with professionals if you’re serious about growing your online presence.

Oamii is a full-service digital marketing agency providing marketing services tailored to the needs of your business. From content creation to PPC management, we have the means to launch your business towards online greatness.

Don’t waste any time reaching out to websites to acquire backlinks and spend your valuable resources on inefficient marketing strategies. With Oamii at the helm, you can focus on your core competencies while we do our magic in the background.

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