Backlink Audit
A periodic full review of every link pointing at your site, checking health, recovering lost value, and identifying anything harmful.
Analogy Mental model
Reconciling the books and clearing out the contact list: who drifted away and should be re-engaged, who slipped in and should be removed.
In practice What you actually do
Run it quarterly in two passes. First recover value: find pages that still have external links but now return an error, then redirect them to the closest live equivalent. Second assess risk: look for sudden spikes in unrelated anchors or foreign-language spam, and update the disavow file only if warranted.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Sites that lose half their traffic after a redesign usually skipped this step, and years of accumulated links ended up pointing at deleted URLs with nothing catching the fall.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →