Backlink Audit: How to Check Your Links and What to Do

You want to know whether the links pointing to your site are helping you, hurting you or just sitting there. A backlink audit gives you that answer. You collect the links other sites have made to yours, look for patterns, and then decide what needs action. For most sites the honest result is “very little needs fixing”. The real value is in finding broken links you can recover and learning what earns you links.

In this guide I walk through how I run a backlink audit with free and paid tools. I cover what a bad link really looks like by Google’s own rules, and what to do once you find one.

What a Backlink Audit Is (and What It Is Not)

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. A backlink audit is a structured review of those links. You check where they come from, what pages they point to, what words they use and whether any break Google’s rules.

It is not a clean-up job by default. Many guides treat the audit as a hunt for “toxic links” to delete. In my experience, that mindset leads people to waste hours and sometimes damage their own rankings. A good audit has three goals:

• Risk check: find links that could lead to a manual action (a penalty applied by a person at Google).
• Recovery: find links that point to broken pages, so you can get their value back.
• Learning: understand which content and relationships bring you links, so you can do more of it.

When You Should Audit Your Backlinks

You do not need to audit every month. These are the moments when I think a backlink audit is worth the time:

• You see an “Unnatural links” message in the Manual actions report in Search Console.
• You are taking over a site and do not know what a past agency or owner did for links.
• You are buying a website or domain and want to know its history.
• You are planning a redesign or migration and need to protect pages that have links.
• You notice a sudden, large jump in linking domains that you did not cause.
• You are starting a link building plan and want a baseline.

Outside those moments, a light review once or twice a year is enough for most small and mid-sized sites. If a past SEO provider bought links for you, check more often until you are confident the profile is clean.

Tools You Need

You can do a useful audit with free tools only. Paid tools add more data and save time on large sites.

Google Search Console

Start with the Links report in Search Console. It shows your top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text (the anchor text, meaning the clickable words of a link). Google’s Links report documentation explains the limits you should know about:

• It shows a sample of links, not every link.
• Tables on screen stop at 1,000 rows, but the export can give you up to 100,000 rows.
• The export comes in two parts: “Latest links” and “More sample links”.
• It does not tell you whether a link is nofollow.
• It can include old links that no longer exist, or links to pages that are gone.

Even with those limits, I always start here. It is Google’s own view of your links, and it is free.

Third-Party Backlink Tools

Backlink tools run their own crawlers, so each one finds a different set of links. They add useful extras: the date a link was first seen, lost links, follow or nofollow status, and rough authority scores. On a large site or a site with a messy past, I combine Search Console data with one paid tool. Combining several tools gives more coverage, but you then need to remove duplicates in a spreadsheet.

A Spreadsheet

This sounds basic, but it matters. You will want one sheet where every linking domain sits on one row with a status column. That sheet becomes your record of what you checked and why you decided what you did.

How to Do a Backlink Audit Step by Step

This is the process I follow. On a small site it takes an hour or two. On a site with tens of thousands of links it can take days, mostly in step 4.

Step 1: Check for a Manual Action First

Open Search Console and go to Security & Manual Actions, then Manual actions. If it says “No issues detected”, you have no link penalty. That changes the whole tone of the audit. You are now looking for opportunities and future risk, not putting out a fire.

If you see “Unnatural links to your site”, the audit becomes urgent. Google is telling you it found a pattern of manipulative links pointing to you. You will need to clean them up and send a reconsideration request.

Step 2: Export Your Links

In the Links report, click Export external links and download both “Latest links” and “More sample links”. Also export the “Top linking sites” and “Top linking text” tables. If you use a paid tool, export its referring domains and backlinks lists too.

Step 3: Group the Links by Domain

Put everything into one sheet and reduce it to one row per linking domain. Judging thousands of single URLs is slow and confusing. Judging a few hundred domains is manageable. Most problems show up at the domain level anyway, such as a spam directory that links to you from 400 pages.

Step 4: Look at the Big Picture

Before you judge any single link, look for patterns. These are the checks I make:

1. Growth over time. If your tool shows link history, look for sudden spikes. Steady growth is normal. A spike of thousands of links in a week that you cannot explain is worth a closer look.
2. Anchor text. Open Top linking text. Most natural profiles are led by your brand name, your URL and generic words. If exact sales phrases like “cheap plumber london” make up a large share, someone probably built those links on purpose.
3. Linking sites. Scan Top linking sites. Do the domains make sense for your business? Local news, suppliers, partners and industry blogs are good signs. Lots of unrelated foreign-language sites or obvious link directories are not.
4. Linked pages. Check Top linked pages. Links to your home page and your best content are normal. Many links with keyword anchors aimed at one money page can point to past link buying.

Step 5: Sort Domains Into Groups

Now go through the domain list and give each one a status. I use four simple labels:

• Good: real sites, relevant or reputable, that a person chose to link from.
• Ignore: low-quality but harmless. Scraper sites, auto-generated stats pages and random spam that you did not create. Google is used to these.
• Check: links you are not sure about. Open the linking page and look at it.
• Risky: links that look paid, swapped or built in bulk, especially with keyword anchors.

Most of your list will land in Good or Ignore. That is normal, and it is a good result.

Step 6: Find Backlinks to Broken Pages

This is the step I would never skip, because it often brings the quickest win. Compare your Top linked pages with your list of pages that return a 404 error (a “page not found” status). The Page indexing report in Search Console lists 404 pages under “Not found (404)”.

When a page with good links returns a 404, the value of those links is mostly lost. Add a 301 redirect (a permanent redirect) from the old URL to the closest live page. If no close match exists, consider bringing the content back. I usually see this after site redesigns, when old blog URLs were changed without redirects.

Step 7: Decide and Record Your Action

For every domain in Check or Risky, decide what to do and write the reason in your sheet. The next section explains the options. Keep the sheet. If you ever need a reconsideration request, it shows Google the work you did.

What a Bad Backlink Actually Looks Like

Google’s spam policies list the kinds of links it treats as link spam. The main examples are:

• Buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, including paying with goods or free products.
• Excessive link exchanges (“link to me and I’ll link to you”).
• Using automated programs or services to create links.
• Advertorials and paid articles with links that pass ranking credit.
• Links with keyword-rich anchor text in guest posts, articles or press releases spread across many sites.
• Low-quality directory and bookmark site links.
• Keyword-rich or hidden links in widgets shared across many sites.
• Links spread widely through footers or templates of other sites.
• Forum comments with optimised links in the post or signature.

Notice what is missing from that list. A link from a weak or unknown site is not spam on its own. A nofollow link is not a problem. A random scraper copying your content with a link is not something you made.

Google also says paid links are fine when they carry a rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" attribute. That tells Google the link should not pass ranking credit.

About “Toxic” Scores

Many backlink tools give links a “toxic” or “spam” score. These scores come from the tool, not from Google. They can help you sort a long list, but they are guesses based on patterns.

My rule: never act on a score alone. Tools often flag normal links from small local sites as high risk. Open the page, look at how the link was placed, and judge it against Google’s examples above.

What to Do With Bad Links

Once you have your Risky list, choose the lightest action that solves the problem. This table is the rule of thumb I use.

Removing Links

For links you or a past provider placed, contact the site owner and ask for removal. Keep it short and polite. Note the date and reply in your sheet. Many owners never reply, and that is fine. Your record still shows you tried.

Disavowing Links

The disavow tool lets you ask Google not to count certain links. Google’s disavow links help page is clear that you should use it only when you have many spammy or low-quality links and they have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action. It also calls it an advanced feature that can harm your performance if used wrongly.

If you do need it, the file is a plain .txt file with one URL or domain per line. Use domain: to cover a whole domain, and # for comments.

# Paid links from 2021 campaign, removal requests sent, no reply
domain:cheap-links-directory.example
domain:article-network.example
https://blog.example/post-with-paid-link/

A few points from Google’s documentation that people often miss:

• Each property has one disavow list. Uploading a new file replaces the old one, so always add to your existing file.
• The limit is 100,000 lines and 2MB.
• The tool does not work with Domain properties, only URL-prefix properties.
• Changes can take a few weeks to take effect, because Google needs to recrawl the linking pages.

In my experience, most sites never need to touch this tool. I only use it after a manual action, or when I know a site has a history of bought links.

What About Negative SEO?

Negative SEO means someone pointing spammy links at your site to hurt it. It worries a lot of site owners when they see strange links in their reports.

Google has said for years that its systems are built to ignore this kind of spam. In December 2022 it said its SpamBrain system was being used to find link spam and cancel out the effect of unnatural links. So when I see a wave of junk links from sites I have never heard of, my default is to note it and watch it. I only act if a manual action appears or if the links clearly look like a paid scheme with my keywords in the anchors.

Use the Audit to Find Link Opportunities

The part of a backlink audit I enjoy most is not the risk check. It is learning what already works.

• Find your most linked content. Top linked pages shows which pages earn links. Ask why. Was it original data, a free tool, a clear guide? Make more of that type.
• Check referral traffic. Some links send real visitors. In GA4 you can see which sites send traffic, so you know which relationships matter beyond SEO. If your tracking is not set up yet, start with this GA4 setup guide.
• Find unlinked or weakly linked pages. Your best service or product pages may have no links at all. Those are the pages to promote through internal links and outreach.
• Look at your best linking sites again. Sites that already link to you once are often happy to link again when you have something useful.
• Compare with competitors. Run the same high-level checks on two or three competitors in a paid tool. Sites that link to several of them, but not to you, are good outreach targets.

When you do improve a page that already has links, make sure the page itself is in good shape. My on-page SEO checklist covers what to check.

Common Backlink Audit Mistakes

These are the errors I see most often:

• Disavowing in bulk based on a tool score. This can throw away good links and lower your rankings.
• Uploading a new disavow file without the old entries. The new file replaces the old one completely.
• Treating every low-authority link as bad. Small sites, local blogs and new sites are a normal part of any real link profile.
• Ignoring broken pages with links. This is often the biggest easy gain, and many audits skip it.
• Judging single URLs instead of domains. It makes the job far slower without better decisions.
• Not writing anything down. Six months later, you will not remember why you kept or disavowed a domain.

Conclusion

A backlink audit is less about deleting links and more about knowing your site. Check for a manual action first, export your links from Search Console, group them by domain, and look for patterns before judging single links. Fix broken pages that have links, remove paid links you control, and keep the disavow tool for real problems.

Once your links are reviewed, put the audit into a wider plan. My SEO checklist for 2025 shows what to fix first across the rest of your site.