How to Protect Your Site by Checking Link Profile

No matter what, link building is always essential to the success of your website. Being a ranking factor for search engines, inbound links are capable enough of bringing visitors to your site. Such links are considered as both direct and indirect source of web traffic.

But there is always a fine line between having a good link profile and getting slapped with a penalty. This is the reason why checking your link profile is necessary and this can help you stay on track for successful link-building. What is Link profile?

In the SEO community when we talk about link profile, it generally refers to inbound links pointing to your website and characteristics of those links. Your site’s link profile includes these following factors:

• • The type of links pointing back to your site
  • The anchor texts
  • The manner in which those links were acquired

To keep SEO clean and pure, Google considers the above factors. By checking the sheer quantity of inbound links to a site, Google can simply prevent SEOs from those unnatural links building tactics.

Let me define it in detail:

The Types of Links Marking Your Site

Quality is something that matters a lot. This signifies that inbound links come from authoritative and legitimate sources. Another essential factor is relevance. A link to your site should make proper sense within the context of the linking page. According to Neil Patel, a good link profile has lots of high authority links and no spammy links. Though this is a known fact, it is still amazing to find out how many people will take a bad link just because it is a link.

When taking tons of links from spammy directories, irrelevant sites will give you link juice at first and you will find yourself with a penalty. But if you can get links from high quality and relevant sites, you will do much better in the long run.

The Anchor Text

If you are a newbie to link building, anchor text is the clickable text of a link. These texts consist of keywords, brand names, and it can be anything. Anchor texts are helpful as they sends signal to the search engines indicating all about the link page.

A large number of keyword rich anchor text inbound links to your site can look unnatural and Google is cracking down on this. In most of the cases, people link naturally with the diluted anchor text. Your priority should be aiming for diversity of anchor text.

How the Links are Obtained?

We all know that Google is not fond of paid links. Their main priority is following quality guidelines. If you are paying for your links, be really smart about it. It is better to grow some natural links first, create good content, and then think of buying links. If you suddenly explode onto the scene, you will be asked dozens of questions. Buying links is not bad but the purpose needs to be apt at the end. Ensure that the link is going to create value for the users.

What makes a good link profile?

A good link profile is the one that is made up of non-spammy and relevant links. There are many sites that are huge but have zero spam flags. This is because of the branded anchor text, all that comes from high authority websites. The branded anchor text itself is diverse.

How to check link profile?

There are some reliable places to do this:

• • Majestic SEO
  • Moz’s Open Site Explorer
  • Raven

All you need to do is type in the URL of the site you want to run some data on and presto, you will get the opportunity to have a look at its backlink profile. The total number of links doesn’t matter. What matters is the quality of those links. It is obvious that you will want to have an even ratio of linking domains to total links. If you have 3000 inbound links and two linking domains, this means that the two sites are linking to you at an average of 1,500 times each.

Keyword rich anchor text is not that effective as it used to be. But anchor text now is more useful and Google-friendly. Keyword rich links need to be smart so that they don’t set off any Google spam alarms.

Another reason to check link profile is to see your recently built links. Checking on regular basis will help you notice any suspicious behavior, helping you to address it before it becomes a major issue. Regular monitoring will keep you on top of your site performance. You will get to know which pages are performing well and which are not.

This also keeps the quality of your backlinks high. When checking profile, ensure you consider the following factors:

• • The relevance of the link
  • The anchor text
  • The ranking of the domain page
  • The placement of the link

Knowing how to evaluate link profile will prevent you from major issues. With proper planning and monitoring, you can protect your website from Google Penalties and increase your search engine ranking.