Link Quality
SEO Issues
Backlink quality is key for pretty much every SEO & AI Visibility strategy. Backlinks have been an important SEO factor for 20+ years and have seen their value increase as its become even clearer that the role they play in SEO and AI visibility is even more important.
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We've helped hundreds of businesses resolve complex SEO issues and achieve sustainable organic growth.
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Then it’s worth getting a backlink audit to establish whether or not your domain and brand are being properly supported with the right quality links.
Backlink quality is key for pretty much every SEO & AI Visibility strategy. Backlinks have been an important SEO factor for 20+ years and have seen their value increase as its become even clearer that the role they play in SEO and AI visibility is even more important.
They are of great importance, but surprisingly a LOT of brands still do not have sufficient link authority behind them because of a lack of an SEO strategy or under-investment into SEO.
Fundamentally:
A good backlink profile is likely to support much better organic performance
Stronger links often bring greater referral traffic opportunities
More + better links will also help with AI search visibility
£999
Backlink audits from
20+
Years delivering audits
1-2
Weeks to delivery
10+
Years experience per auditor
WHAT WE OFFER
We offer a comprehensive backlink auditing service for clients who are struggling with rankings, ranking declines, AI visibility & overall domain trust issues. We provide SEO consulting and SEO auditing to help provide insights, guidance and a forward growth strategy.
At its core we offer:
- SEO audits of your domains backlink profile along with insights and recommendations
- A review of the quality of your domains links, the volume, growth rate over time, distribution of links to top pages & a full quality assessment
- A review of the domains linking to you by traffic profile, topical trust flow and relevance
- A review of link distribution and the anchor text profiles used
- A review of link networks, tiered links, link spam or link manipulation
- A review of disavowed links
- A review of your previous SEO/link building efforts
- A review of your competitors link profiles and a cross-comparison
- SEO Consultation
- Guidance for forward link building strategies i.e. link earning, niche edits, guest posts, HARO/featured style quote links, digital PR, link reclamation etc.
- We can also provide link building services for clients via our SEO agency
HOW IT CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS
Backlink analysis and auditing is crucial because it plays a fundamental part in supporting a websites organic performance as well as brand strength. A link assessment can help you to:
Stop wasting money on the wrong SEO / Link building strategies
Give you insights as to cost effectiveness of your current link building / SEO efforts
It can help you adjust your link building strategy to get better organic results
It saves time and money and improves overall efficiency
It can help reduce potential SEO issues later down the line i.e. if Google launches a link or spam update where a large swathe of your links could potentially lose value
It can reduce the net cost per link
It can help with increasing link accruement rates
It can help with supporting internal pages rank better for their target keywords
Ultimately, the end benefit is that your website does better in organic search i.e. Google / Bing and ultimately gets more traffic, sales, leads and ROI.
WHAT ARE THE MOST COMMON ISSUES BUSINESSES FACE WITH LINK BUILDING?
A large portion of link building services out there on the web are effectively based on buying links, usually from link sellers or link building sites which effectively resell link insertions on pre-existing content (niche edits) or get you links from guest post submissions.
Perhaps one of the most common link issues that we see are businesses who are investing in SEO where link building ultimately comes down to buying poor quality link insertions, often where the link is priced based on the DR of the domain (Domain Rating).
Often, higher DR sites command a higher link insertion or “guest post” price and a lot of the time, the value for money for the link is terrible, usually because there are 1 or more “men in the middle” resellers who add markup for what is a poor quality link.
Link prices can often be in excess of £150-£300 ($250-$500) per link for higher DR domains i.e. DR 50+ but often where the domain's traffic levels (estimated) are low.
A lot of sites that publish content solely for the purpose of selling link placements often use grey-hat and black-hat SEO techniques to artificially inflate their DR (domain rating) or DA (domain authority) metrics so they can charge a higher premium for a link.
But, the reality is, a lot of these sites are often full to the hilt of low quality content, topically irrelevant content and exhibit poor traffic levels / indexation over time. This means money is effectively being wasted on sites that often have poor traffic profiles or have had their traffic tank over the years because they’ve accepted mounds of poor quality guest posts.
The most common issues within this issue are:
- Domains have artificially inflated domain metrics & offer little to no link equity
- Domains often have large swathes of content de-indexed, meaning you get no link value whatsoever
- Larger amounts of links are needed to get an accumulative effect that’s much easier to get by building far less links but much higher quality links
- Links from these types of sites tend to get wiped out during core or spam updates - so if you did get any link equity, it’s generally short-lived
Alongside inflated domain metrics, a lot of sites that offer link insertions and guest posts are generally propped up by PBN (private blog network) links or tiered links. This makes the domains far more susceptible to ranking and traffic losses and ultimately lead to wasted link spend.
Google’s stricter indexing policies sees lower quality content / AI generated content often get ignored/not indexed. A lot of guest post content is generally either poor quality content, plagiarised content or has been written with AI.
It’s getting harder to get content indexed, especially on domains that have recognised patterns of rapid content growth and spammy links or obvious link selling schemes - so, if your content with your link within goes on the target domain but never gets indexed, you’ve effectively wasted that budget.
Google gets a lot of submissions for sites being reported for violating google’s webmaster guidelines, but, not only that, Google will be aware of websites that are actively engaged in link selling/buying schemes.
Google’s stance is that buying links goes against their webmaster guidelines, however, buying a link insertion is OK as long as the mark is marked as rel=”sponsored” - at which point it’s unlikely you’ll get any link equity or benefit from it.
Google can quickly devalue an entire domain if that site exhibits signs of mass link selling or ridiculous ratios of outbound links.
If you are lucky to get a link from a website with some traffic, if that domain has a high OBL (outbound links) ratio i.e. it links out far more than the links that come in - it generally means any potential link equity is heavily diluted or lost.
This means any potential benefit diminishes, again, the value for money is just not there.
Buying links i.e. guest posts or niche edits carries a risk that editors of the site come back and scrub links that have been paid for - this happens a lot. There are millions of links built every day, at least 20% of those will likely disappear within a 6 month period and a further 10% over the 12 month period.
This happens because most people buy links but do not keep an eye on them, so they can get taken down or removed without the webmaster knowing.
A lot of businesses invest heavily into SEO because it’s a highly effective marketing channel and can deliver a significant, compounding ROI. However, a lot of the cost of an SEO strategy does include the cost of building links whether brought or earnt.
But, for link strategies where “men in the middle” resellers add markup on links that are worthless anyway can quickly lead to a lot of wasted link budget / link spend.
This means that there is often a terrible spend to benefit ratio.
Link farms can increase the possibility of a manual action
Whilst this has become significantly less common, if a website's link profile screams spammy/black hat approaches it can sometimes trigger a manual action in Google search console (like a penalty - suppressing specific pages or the site overall).
Link farms (guest post sites) i.e. your typical generic wordpress themed news website with broad categories of content types where there are loads of irrelevant, jumbled articles often with a lot of outbound links can contribute towards a potential manual action.
Whilst it is FAR less common then it used to be because of negative SEO attacks on domains, they do still exist, and if your link profile screams “cheating” because of mass link building from garbage / low quality sites, it CAN potentially lead to a manual action for spammy link building / spam.
We’ve seen clients who have had to disavow large swathes of links they brought to get a reconsideration request through (where Google lifts the penalising action) - meaning a lot of link equity is lost to the disavow and subsequently wasted link spend.
Here are some of the most common SEO / Link Building issues we see with businesses buying links, SEO or digital PR:
WHAT YOU GET WITH OUR BACKLINK ANALYSIS
When you buy a link audit, we conduct a thorough teardown of your domains backlinks, looking at everything from where your links come from to the topical theme of those links, the traffic profile, link distribution and more.
Typically we give you:
- An initial analysis of your websites SEO & organic performance
- A full backlink audit (in Google Slides / PDF format)
- Link analysis and insights (google sheets)
- Link building strategy (guidance documentation)
- Onward support if required
You are buying a full analysis with recommendations to action and a forward strategy - this provides you with a full end to end solution.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE
Generally for most clients who book a backlink analysis the audit will take 1-2 weeks depending on our workload and the size of your domains backlink profile. Most clients can expect to receive their analysis and audit within 2 weeks.
We will let you know ahead of time if more time is required.
WHY CHOOSE US TO HELP SOLVE LINK BUILDING ISSUES?
Because we have extensive experience working with brands on link auditing followed by a link building strategy. The main reasons to choose SEO audits io for your link analysis are:
We have over 20 years experience delivering backlink audits
We’ve performed hundreds of link audits over the years
We’re fully acquainted with all link building types, strategies, challenges
We understand how to evaluate and properly measure link weighting
We’ve been able to consistently save businesses time and money by helping them to pivot their link building efforts towards what our strategies advise on
Our backlink auditors have a minimum of 10 years experience each
We have extensive SEO experience & expertise
We’re rated 5* by our clients / customers
We deliver no-bs, clear & concise analysis & guidance
FAQS
This is a complex question because there’s often more than 1 reason why a website fails to rank despite there being concerted SEO efforts. Usually sites that fail to gain rankings over time are likely to have content and link trust issues.
During the backlink analysis process we can help identify why your rankings aren’t moving or why you haven’t seen organic growth.
USUALLY, in most cases it tends to be a combination of content quality issues along with insufficient high quality relevant backlinks.
Yes they can and that is one of the primary reasons why we offer the service. Before we audit your websites backlinks we take a look at your websites google search console data to ascertain your organic performance over time i.e. keyword/query and page performance, non brand keyword performance, page performance etc.
Then we do the backlink audit looking at how your root domain and how internal pages are supported (link volumes, link quality, link types, link contexts, link topic, distribution of links to top pages, anchor tests and more).
When we have ascertained what’s going on from an SEO / Link perspective we can then provide professional, strategic guidance to help you get on the right track with ranking and click growth.
Often when clients implement our advice / strategies and begin to start getting much better quality links they see their rankings start to move and grow over time.
If you are and have actively been spending money buying links from link sellers / guest post specialists or link selling websites we would advise on holding off spending anything further until we’ve conducted a backlink review for your domain.
If you continue to spend money on links that could either add no value or potentially be detrimental, that's money wasted that could otherwise have been spent in a better area and more efficiently.
Get A Backlink Audit
They are of great importance, but surprisingly a LOT of brands still do not have sufficient link authority behind them because of a lack of an SEO strategy or under-investment into SEO.
We offer backlink audits from £999 which include a thorough deep-dive into your domains link profile as well as analysis of what you do need, what competitor link profiles look like, where the gaps are and a forward strategy.
Find Out What Your Links Are Worth
Send us your domain and we will advise on the backlink audit and forward link strategy that fits your position.
