Backlink audit: analysing your link profile

What is a backlink audit?

A backlink audit, also called a link audit, takes stock of a site’s inbound links. How many domains cite it, from which pages, with which anchors? How does this profile evolve over time? From this, it draws the risks to address and the gaps to close compared with competitors.

It is the third area of a full SEO audit, after technical and semantic. It comes before any link building strategy: you do not run a link campaign without knowing where you start from.

Why audit your link profile?

• Rule out a risk: unqualified paid links, artificial networks, acquisition spikes followed by drops.
• Measure the gap with competitors on the target queries, not only at domain level.
• Recover lost value: backlinks pointing to deleted pages.
• Choose the target pages of a future campaign according to their real potential.

The weight of links should be kept in perspective. According to Gary Illyes, an analyst at Google, the search engine needs very few links to rank pages (Search Engine Journal report, April 22, 2024). A backlink audit is therefore less about counting links than about checking their quality and compliance.

How do you run a backlink audit in 6 steps?

1. Check for manual actions and export the links

Open the Manual Actions report in Search Console. A manual action for unnatural links comes before the rest of the audit. Then export the Links report. It is a sample, not a complete inventory. But the links it lists come from pages that Google has taken into account. Archive the export at each audit: a link that appears and then disappears is a bad sign for durability.

2. Build the inventory of referring domains

No tool sees the whole web. Supplement Search Console with one or two third-party tools: Ahrefs, Majestic, Semrush, Babbar or Haloscan. Deduplicate by referring domain, then plot the acquisition curve over time.

A steady curve is healthy. A spike followed by a drop is the typical profile of links bought in bulk, then removed or deindexed.

3. Qualify the links one by one

Criterion	What you check	Why
Host page	Indexed, close in topic, itself linked within its site	A page that is not indexed passes nothing on
Placement	Body text, menu, sidebar, footer	An editorial link in the main content is worth more than a link repeated everywhere
Attribute	None, nofollow, sponsored, ugc	The last three, in principle, pass no signal
Markup	<a> tag with a valid href	A link that cannot be crawled does not exist for Google
Target	Page returning 200, consistent with the anchor	A link to a 404 is lost

Google asks for paid links to be qualified with sponsored or nofollow. Links from user-generated content take ugc (documentation on outbound links). To be followed, a link must be an <a> tag with an href attribute (crawlable links). How signals are passed on is explained in our article on PageRank.

4. Analyse the anchors

Sort anchors into four families: brand, naked URL, generic, optimised (containing the keyword). A natural profile is dominated by brand and URL anchors.

Two alert thresholds serve as benchmarks. They are agency conventions, not Google rules. An exact-match anchor above 5% of the total deserves a closer look; no anchor should exceed 15%. Also look for off-topic anchors or anchors in a foreign language.

5. Check compliance with Google’s rules

Google’s spam policies class several practices as “link spam” (Spam policies, updated on August 28, 2026). They include buying or selling links meant for ranking and excessive link exchanges. Add to these footer links replicated across many sites and low-quality directories. A paid link without a sponsored or nofollow attribute is, by definition, outside these rules.

A sponsored article on a media site also falls under the “site reputation abuse” policy. On November 19, 2024, Google specified that the publisher’s editorial oversight does not exempt third-party content (policy update). Since August 30, 2026, Google no longer applies manual actions under this policy to results in the European Economic Area (Google Search Central blog, August 28, 2026). This is a change in how the policy is enforced, not a permission.

6. Compare with competitors and build the action plan

Compare your profile with at least three competitors, query by query: referring domains, target pages, shared sources. A site that cites several of your competitors is a legitimate link lead.

• recover backlinks pointing to 404s with a 301 redirect to the equivalent page;
• fix non-compliant paid links, or have them qualified;
• spread future links across strategic pages, rarely the home page;
• plan follow-up checks: presence, attribute and indexing of the links at D+30, D+90, then every six months.

Would you rather hand over this diagnosis? The audit is part of Elev8 Lab’s SEO and GEO services.

Which tools should you use to audit your backlinks?

Tool	Own metrics	Recommended use
Google Search Console	Links report (sample)	Google reference, manual actions
Ahrefs	Domain Rating, referring domains	Inventory, unlinked mentions
Majestic	Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Topical Trust Flow	Topics of the sources
Semrush	Authority Score	Competitive comparison
Babbar, Haloscan	Induced strength, site data	Topical relevance, prospecting

Should you disavow links after the audit?

Rarely. The disavow tool still exists in Search Console (Google help on disavowing). On March 6, 2026, John Mueller of Google summed it up: most sites do not need it, but not all (Search Engine Roundtable).

Keep the disavow for two cases. The first: a manual action for unnatural links. The second: a known, problematic history of buying links. Outside these cases, it is conditional work, not a default step.

Which misconceptions should you set aside?

• “You need 10% nofollow links”: Google has never published any ratio. Nofollow links come on their own (social networks, forums, press).
• “More links, better rankings”: a link from a page that is not indexed or off topic brings nothing.
• “A good domain guarantees a good link”: value is judged on the host page, not on the domain.
• “A nofollow link is negative”: it passes no authority, but it can bring traffic and awareness.

Does a backlink audit matter for visibility in AI?

Partly. Answer engines rely on well-ranked pages. They also take into account a brand’s reputation on the web, through links or simple mentions. A useful backlink audit therefore also lists unlinked brand mentions, which can be turned into links.

The brand’s presence in AI answers is a matter of GEO optimisation. For the consistency of the content these links reinforce, see the semantic audit.