How to manage your backlinks is a question every website owner should ask when aiming for sustainable SEO growth. Backlinks are not just about quantity, they reflect your site’s authority and relevance in the eyes of search engines. Without proper management, even good links can become liabilities.
From monitoring link quality to spotting toxic domains and optimizing anchor texts, knowing how to handle backlinks is crucial. In this guide, we’ll walk you through proven techniques and smart tools to help you maintain a healthy backlink profile. Let’s explore the strategies that keep your SEO strong and your rankings on the rise.
Why You Should Manage Your Backlinks?
Effective backlink management involves monitoring, analyzing, and building a strong, high-quality backlink profile. This includes identifying and addressing broken links, evaluating the quality of existing backlinks, and actively seeking opportunities to build new, relevant links.
Backlink management is an important and indispensable part of the overall SEO optimization process for a website. A quality backlink profile will include backlinks from reputable, relevant, and trustworthy websites. Quality backlinks will help increase the trust of search engines in your website.
If you build good backlinks, it will bring quality traffic and also help improve keyword rankings significantly. However, if you do not control their quality and development, your website will have many ineffective links. When you understand how to manage backlinks, you will have a more comprehensive view of optimizing the external link structure, thereby improving SEO efficiency and maintaining stability in the long term.
How to Manage Your Backlinks: 10 Useful Techniques
You need to apply the right techniques to optimize your backlink profile. Let’s explore 10 effective backlink management strategies, from checking referring page traffic to building new links, to help boost your website’s rankings and stability.
1. Check Referring Page Traffic
Backlinks help improve search engine rankings and also bring referral traffic to your website. When your website is linked from high-traffic sources, you will receive more traffic from the right audience.
The type of traffic from backlinks is often more effective than traffic from Google because users are coming from directly related articles or content. You can check the traffic from referring pages in the backlinks report. Google Analytics also helps track the exact traffic from backlinks.
2. Check Dofollow vs Nofollow Link Ratio
Dofollow links carry SEO weight and should be prioritized for ranking purposes. However, Nofollow is still useful because it can bring valuable traffic. A healthy backlink profile should have both, with an ideal ratio of about 3:1 in favor of Dofollow.
When analyzing, focus on the number of Dofollow vs Nofollow domains rather than individual links. Many links come from low-quality sources like social media or automated directories.
3. Check Link Velocity
Link velocity represents the rate at which the number of backlinks your website receives increases or decreases over time. If the link velocity is steady and tends to increase, your link profile will be highly valued.
On the other hand, if the link growth rate stagnates or decreases sharply (i.e., you lose more links than you get new links), it could be a sign that your backlink strategy is in trouble and needs to be adjusted promptly.
4. Check Referring Domains
Referring domains have a higher SEO value than repeated links from the same source. Having 10 different websites linking to your site is much better than having 10 links from the same website.
You should focus on expanding the number of different websites linking to your site. Your backlink profile will look more natural and trustworthy to search engines when you have a variety of sources linking to your site.
5. Analyze Backlink Gaps
A backlink gap occurs when a website links to your competitor but not to you. If you and your competitor have similar products and content, you should find and fill the link gap to avoid falling behind in the SEO competition.
6. Check Anchor Text Distribution
Anchor text tells readers what the linked page is about and directly influences SEO rankings thanks to the keywords in it, even if the keywords don’t appear on the page.
If your page is linked to with the anchor text “how to manage your backlinks”, you may start ranking for that keyword. However, avoid overdoing it. Balance exact match anchor text and keyword variations to avoid being considered spammy by Google.
7. Reclaim Lost Backlinks
It’s normal to lose backlinks. Sometimes, the page is updated. Other times, the editor removes the link because it is no longer relevant. However, if they’re quality links, you should check them periodically and reach out to them to restore them.
8. Claim Unlinked Mentions
When a site mentions your brand or content but doesn’t link to it, it’s an easy opportunity to seize. Simply find the person’s email, send a polite note, and ask them to add a link to the mention. Most of the time, they’ll agree, and you’ll get a quality link with little effort.
9. Disavow Toxic Links
Now, if your site is clean and has never been penalized by Google, you don’t need to worry about disavowing bad links – Google is smart enough to handle it. However, if you have been penalized (or suspect you have been), use the Google Disavow tool to disavow toxic links and gradually recover your rankings. Only do this when necessary, as false disavows can further damage your SEO.
10. Build New Backlinks
Building new links is the most important step in maintaining and improving your SEO. Diversify your strategy – from guest posting, ABC link exchanges, link building, to using the skyscraper technique, reviewing products, or finding broken links to replace.
Necessary Tools for Backlink Management
Let’s explore useful tools to check, monitor, and optimize your backlink profile for optimal results.
- Google Search Console: Google Search Console allows you to see the websites that are linking to your site, the linking keywords, and the URLs that have received the most backlinks. While GSC doesn’t go into depth, it’s free, easy to use, and a great place to start tracking backlinks.
- Ahrefs: Ahrefs lets you check page authority, remove low-quality links, and track traffic from backlinks. You can set up a Rank Tracker to see how backlinks are affecting your search results. The basic account costs $99/month, which is more than enough for your backlink monitoring needs.
- Semrush: Semrush is a powerful SEO tool that is especially useful for tracking and managing backlinks. The cheapest plan costs $119.95/month, making it easy to analyze backlinks and conduct audits to find bad links.
- SE Ranking: SE Ranking is a simpler tool than Ahrefs or Semrush, but still very useful for backlink monitoring. Starting at $39/month, you can analyze referring domains, sites linking to you, anchor text, measure backlink value, and track your competitors’ backlinks.
- Monitor Backlinks: Prices start at just $20/month. Monitor Backlinks specializes in tracking links pointing to your website and keyword rankings.
Bottom Line
As you can see, understanding how to manage your backlinks is extremely important in your SEO strategy. When you apply the right techniques and tools, you can build a quality link profile, boost your search engine rankings, and avoid unnecessary SEO problems. Get started implementing effective backlink management methods and track your results to achieve success!
To increase the efficiency of backlinks management, you can refer to the high-quality link building service from Jeenam. With a professional and experienced team, we ensure to help you optimize the effectiveness of strong link building.
