How to Do a Backlink Audit

A backlink audit is a systematic review of all the links pointing to your site. The goal is to understand the overall quality of your link profile, identify any links that might be causing harm, and find opportunities to build more of the links that are helping you rank.

Most sites should run a backlink audit at least once a year. Sites that have seen unexplained ranking drops, have a history of link building activity, or are preparing for a domain migration should run one sooner.

What you are looking for

A good backlink audit answers four questions:

1. How many unique domains link to my site, and are the numbers growing?
2. What is the quality mix of those links?
3. Are there any links that could be causing harm?
4. What link-building opportunities can I identify from the data?

Step 1: Pull your backlink data

Start by running your domain through Crawly's backlink checker. Enter your domain and wait for the results to load.

You will see:

• Total referring domains and backlinks
• A quality breakdown (High, Medium, Low)
• PageRank rank with a global percentile
• The full list of linking domains

Export the full list as a CSV. This becomes your working dataset for the audit.

Step 2: Assess the overall profile

Before looking at individual links, get a high-level view of the profile.

Referring domain count. Is this number growing, flat, or declining? A growing count suggests your link-building is working. A declining count may mean links are being removed or that sites linking to you are going offline.

Quality mix. What proportion of your referring domains are rated High, Medium, or Low? A healthy profile has a mix of High and Medium with a relatively small Low tail. If the majority of your links are rated Low, that warrants further investigation.

PageRank rank. Where does your domain sit in the global ranking? The percentile label makes this easy to contextualise. A site in the top 1% has a strong profile; a site in the bottom half has significant room to grow.

Step 3: Identify potentially harmful links

In the Crawly backlink checker, domains ranked below 50 million globally are flagged as potentially toxic. These are typically very low-traffic sites, link farms, spam directories, or hacked pages.

In your CSV export, filter for these flagged domains and review them. Not every low-ranked domain is harmful. A niche community site or a new publication might have a low PageRank rank simply because it is not yet well established. Use your judgement.

The links most likely to cause harm share several characteristics:

• The linking site has no clear topic or audience
• The anchor text is overly keyword-rich (e.g. "best SEO agency London" rather than your brand name)
• The site has hundreds or thousands of outbound links on each page
• The site looks like it was built purely to pass links

If you identify a significant number of links in this category, you may need to build a Google disavow file.

Step 4: Review your anchor text distribution

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. Google uses anchor text as a relevance signal, but an unnatural anchor text distribution can be a red flag.

A natural profile looks roughly like this:

• Brand anchors (your company name): the largest share, typically 30 to 50%
• Naked URLs (e.g. www.yourcomain.com): 15 to 25%
• Generic anchors (e.g. "click here", "read more"): 10 to 20%
• Partial match and exact match keywords: a small minority, 5 to 15%

If exact-match keyword anchors make up a large proportion of your link profile, this can look manipulative to Google and may be contributing to ranking suppression. This pattern is common on sites that have done aggressive anchor-text-optimised link building in the past.

Step 5: Check for lost and new links

A backlink audit is most useful when you can track changes over time. Compare your current referring domain count against the previous month. Are you gaining more than you are losing?

If you are consistently losing referring domains, investigate why. Common causes include:

• Pages on the linking sites being deleted or restructured
• Your own URLs changing without proper redirects in place
• Links being removed editorially after a site redesign

If you recently had a site migration, run a check to confirm that all old URLs are redirecting properly. Broken redirects cause backlinks to dead URLs that no longer pass value. Crawly's redirect checker lets you paste a list of URLs and verify each one resolves correctly.

Step 6: Benchmark against competitors

Pull the same data for two or three of your main competitors using the backlink checker tool. Compare:

• Referring domain counts
• Quality mix
• PageRank rank

If competitors have significantly more referring domains in the High quality tier, that gap represents the link-building work ahead of you. For a detailed guide on using competitor data to find opportunities, see how to find and analyse competitor backlinks.

Step 7: Create an action plan

By this point you should have a clear picture of three things:

1. Links to disavow. A list of domains you want Google to ignore, ready to be formatted as a disavow file.
2. Links to pursue. Sites that link to competitors but not to you, or sites in your industry that would be natural link targets.
3. On-site issues to fix. If broken pages on your site have external links pointing to them, fixing those URLs or setting up redirects will recover lost link equity.

Document all three and prioritise by potential impact. Recovering a 404 page with strong external links pointing to it is a quick win. Building links from high-authority sites takes longer but compounds over time.

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A backlink audit is not a one-off task. Run one quarterly if you are actively building links, and at minimum once a year for any site that depends on organic search traffic.

Start your audit now by using Crawly's tool to check your backlinks. No account needed.