Link Audit & Cleanup Service

What is a Link Audit?

Backlink Profile Analysis | Backlink Audit | SEO Link Audit 

A link audit is the process of analyzing a website's backlink profile to assess the quality, relevance, and potential risks associated with its inbound links. Backlinks play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO), as they influence how search engines rank a website in their results. A link audit helps ensure that the backlinks pointing to a site are beneficial and not harming its SEO performance. We do link audits to:

• Identify Toxic Links: Detect spammy, irrelevant, or low-quality backlinks that could lead to penalties from search engines (e.g., Google’s Penguin algorithm).
• Evaluate Link Quality: Assess the authority, relevance, and trustworthiness of linking domains.
• Understand Link Diversity: Examine the variety of links in terms of anchor text, linking domains, and types of links (e.g., dofollow vs. nofollow).
• Improve SEO Strategy: Identify opportunities to build new high-quality links and strengthen the existing backlink profile.
• Monitor Compliance: Ensure the website follows search engine guidelines to avoid penalties.

Why Do You Charge $1250 For a Link Audit and Disavow?

Some webmasters charge money to have a link removed. We recently did a link audit for a client who had been quoted $500 to remove a backlink from an offending website. Our link audit services costs $1250 because:

1. It saves you time.
2. We have access to the tools to do it (Moz alone costs $350 per month, for a small plan).
3. We will walk you through the steps that we took to improve your site.
4. We will help you lay the footprint for an SEO recovery. 
5. We are also one of the only SEO companies that will help you start rebuilding your website with a custom strategy as well. 

When Should You Purchase a Link Audit Service?

You should get a link audit in any of the following situations: 

• Drop in Rankings or Traffic: A sudden decrease in rankings or traffic can often indicate penalties or the presence of low-quality backlinks. Conducting a link audit helps identify and resolve harmful links, restoring your site’s SEO health.
• Before/After Algorithm Updates: Google frequently updates how it evaluates backlinks, such as with the Penguin algorithm. Performing a link audit before or after these updates ensures your backlink profile complies with current best practices and avoids penalties.
• Acquiring or Merging Websites: When buying a domain or merging websites, a link audit helps you assess the quality of the acquired site’s backlinks. This ensures there are no spammy or toxic links that could harm your SEO.
• Regular SEO Maintenance: Backlink profiles evolve over time, so conducting quarterly or bi-annual link audits helps maintain a clean and healthy backlink profile, avoiding potential risks and ensuring ongoing optimization.
• Manual Penalty: If Google issues a penalty due to unnatural or spammy links, a link audit is essential to identify problematic backlinks. Removing or disavowing these links can help your site recover its rankings.
• New SEO Strategy: When changing focus to target new keywords or audiences, a link audit can help refine your backlink profile to align with your updated SEO goals, ensuring better support for your new strategy.
• After Extensive Link Building: Following a link-building campaign, a link audit verifies the quality, relevance, and diversity of your new backlinks. This ensures your efforts improve your SEO without adding any risks.
• Before Competitive Analysis: To effectively benchmark against competitors, you need a clear understanding of your current backlink profile. A link audit helps establish this baseline and identifies areas for improvement.
• Rebranding or URL Changes: During a rebrand or domain change, a link audit ensures that backlinks are correctly redirected and that no harmful links are impacting your new site, safeguarding your SEO efforts.
• Negative SEO Suspicions: If you suspect competitors are building harmful backlinks to sabotage your rankings, a link audit can help identify and mitigate these issues to protect your website’s performance.

How Do You Conduct a Link Audit? 

After your purchase, you will need to add info@seogonewild.com as a user to your Google Search Console with full administrative access. Our link audit process is intensive. Here is how we do it:

• We conduct a manual audit of your Search Console to expect all of your backlinks. 
• We export a list of your backlinks and cross check it with SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs and do a VLookup.
• We then do a disavow of any of your backlinks that appear to be spammy.
• We will also do MANUAL OUTREACH to the webmasters of the spammy sites to take your links down (most of the time, they don't, but it can help). 

A disavow is a manual process where we upload a text file to Google and make sure that those bad backlinks no longer count against your rankings.

What To Expect After a Link Audit and Link Cleanup

Here is an example of a link audit and disavow that we did in late 2024. The website ranked for almost 5,000 keywords. Then, Google dropped the website in the slew of helpful content updates in 2024. The link audit and disavow was done about one month before the keywords started coming back. 

What To Expect After a Link Audit and Disavow:

You shouldn't expect an immediate traffic and rankings recovery. Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. You might need to rework some of the content on your website to reestablish expertise, trustworthiness, and authority.
2. It might be six weeks to as long as four months before your rankings start to improve.
3. Link audits and disavows are only ONE part of a Google penalty recovery. 

Why Should a Link Audit Be Done By a Professional?

n SEO professional should handle link audits and disavows rather than a webmaster because of the specialized knowledge and strategic approach required. Here’s why:

1. Expertise in SEO Best Practices: SEO professionals understand Google’s guidelines and know how to differentiate between healthy and harmful backlinks. They can identify links that might trigger penalties, which requires more than just basic technical skills.

2. Strategic Evaluation: An SEO expert considers the bigger picture—evaluating how each link fits into the site’s overall strategy, authority, and niche relevance. Webmasters may not have the tools or insights to assess the quality or impact of links on search rankings.

3. Advanced Tools and Analysis: SEO professionals use sophisticated tools (e.g., Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz) to conduct in-depth link audits. These tools help identify patterns of spammy or unnatural links that might not be immediately visible to a webmaster.

4. Minimizing Risk: Disavowing links is a nuanced process. Incorrectly disavowing good links can harm your rankings. SEO professionals know how to approach this with precision, ensuring beneficial links remain untouched.

5. Recovery Expertise: If a site is penalized, an SEO professional knows how to create a thorough reconsideration request and communicate effectively with Google.

By entrusting this process to an SEO professional, you ensure accuracy, strategic alignment, and long-term protection of your site’s search performance.