As all internet marketers are aware, backlinks are the crux of the whole SEO business. These form one of the most important signals for Google when it examines your website therefore, you want to learn as much as possible about your backlink profile. This knowledge will let you acquire new opportunities as well as improve your current backlink situation.

Whether you need to find bad, spammy backlinks that you have inadvertently acquired, or find new linking possibilities, backlink analysis is the way to go. You should get into the habit of conducting this on a regular basis as doing so can greatly benefit your online presence. However, it’s not just your page that you want to analyse – you want to go after your competition as well, as that’s where the precious backlink opportunities are. There are plenty of tools that can help you with this, and some of them are even free to use, however, today, I’m going to tell you about the one I like the most – Linkody. I think it’s the easiest and most intuitive tool out there and, moreover, it provides in-depth data about yours and your competitors’ backlinks. You can get a free 30-day trial on their website.

How to conduct a backlink analysis?

Here are the main points you’ll need to cover:

Choose the websites you want to analyse

While your website is the priority here, you’ll need to look into some other ones too—namely, those of your competition. If you’ve been in the business for some time, you probably know who your competitors are. If not, there’s an easy way to find out.

Finding your competition

All you need to do is enter a given keyword that’s associated with your business. You may want to look for very competitive keywords, as these are what most of your rivals will be optimising for. Now, look around the SERP and find websites that fit your niche. After just a couple of Google searches, you’ll most likely get a good idea of who your competitors are.

Next, all you need to do is to click onto the Competitors tab in Linkody and add as many as you can. I’d advise that you add the ones that match your niche relatively closely and are prominent in the industry.

Number of Referring Domains

This is the number of websites that contain a link back to your page. We’re not talking about individual pages, but entire domains. Figures show that referring domains are a much better metric than the total number of links. The more links you have from a single domain, the lower their power when it comes to ranking.

You want to compare your number of referring domains to that of your competition. This is a telltale sign of how competitive the niche is and how high you stand among them.

Note how Linkody only shows you the referring domains. In fact, it’s much better to gain links from new websites than from ones you already have links from. However, if you want, you can add links from repeated domains manually.

After going through the competition, I noticed that the number of referring domains is more or less the same. This is one of the signs that the backlinks profile of this particular case is relatively good.

If you see that you have many more referring domains to your website, then it’s a signal that the links you have are spammy. You want to avoid such backlinks at all costs, as they can hurt your rankings and result in penalties by Google.

On the other hand, if the number of referring domains is much lower than your competition’s, that means you’re slacking, and you need to up your link building game a tad.

Anchors

Next up, you want to go to the Profile tab in Linkody. Here, you can see lots of useful analytical data about your link profile. What we’re interested in right now are the anchors.

From this, you can determine if your anchor profile is healthy. What you should aim for is variety and relevance. Brand keywords should be your primary target. Following the Penguin update, it’s harder than ever to rank for the more competitive keywords. Nowadays, you want to ensure diversification in your anchor texts and make sure this is as natural as possible.

We haven’t established the perfect distribution of the types of anchor texts, as it differs from niche to niche. Having said that a good rule of thumb to follow is the distribution of around 30-40% of branding texts, 30-40% of partial match anchors and 20-40% of generic, random, exact match and other types.

Domain ity and Spam Score metrics

These metrics are hugely important in terms of the quality of your backlinks. The principle you should follow when conducting link building campaigns is quality over quantity. A link from a domain with 60 DA is much more valuable than ten links from a 15 DA domain. Sure, it takes much more time to build those high-quality links, but in the end, that’s where the juice is. Now, using Linkody, we can determine how you fare compared to your competition.

In this case, the discrepancy is quite large. You can see on the left that the distribution is not too good.

Further down, you have the Spam Score metric. You should aim to get links from websites that have as low a Spam Score as possible. Although this metric is not as decisive as DA, you can rely on it to a certain extent.

From this, you can conclude that you’ll need to focus on acquiring links from high-quality websites. Later on, I’ll tell you how to find such opportunities using Linkody.

TLD and Location

Further down, we can see the graphs for the top-level domains and the locations.

Most likely, the top TLDs will include .com in the first place. That’s good, it’s perfectly normal, as most of the websites end with .com. In this case, .pl is in the second place, as Landingi is Poland-based, so that’s pretty standard too. Now, if you see tons of links that have weird top-level domains that don’t really correspond to your business, this is where you want to take action and disavow links. Same goes for the geolocation.

Disavow rules

If you find some unhealthy, spammy links from shady domains, you can create rules that automatically Twitter Tweet