Link Profile Audit

We offer link audits as both a one-time deal and an ongoing one, especially when there are link problems and penalties involved. A basic link audit starts at $1500 but depending upon the size of the site and the known issues, some link audits do take much longer to complete and are thus charged at a higher rate. Each link audit provides you with competitor analysis so that you know how to stand in comparison, advice on what’s good and bad in your profile and steps to take to help fix the problems, and, if requested, a list of links for disavowing.

A basic link audit starts at $1500 but depending upon the size of the site and the known issues, some link audits do take much longer to complete and are thus charged at a higher rate

For these audits, we use information from Link Risk, Link Research Tools, and Majestic SEO. Since Google’s Webmaster Tools only reports a sampling of links, we don’t usually use that information unless a penalty is involved and we don’t feel confident that the links are covered in another tool. We do use metrics and tool flags in order to help us identify the bad links but if we’re working on a disavow file, we hand review the flagged links. Sometimes we find great links that are flagged as bad ones, and sometimes we find horrible ones that didn’t get caught. Our goal is to find all the problem links and formulate a plan for how to handle them whether it’s clean-up or disavowing.

Each audit is done with a specific goal in mind. If we know there is a penalty and we’re looking at generating a list of links for clean-up or disavowing, we’ll focus on finding those links. If there is no penalty in place but perhaps the site isn’t ranking as well as it once was or the client is simply worried about the profile, we’ll perform analysis in a different way, looking at anchor text breakdown, followed vs no followed links, images vs text links, etc. Sometimes sites are well over-optimized for certain keywords and while this information is easy to find, it’s very difficult to formulate a plan to fix it properly. Our link audits all come with recommendations on what to do to help fix the problems along with priority codes so that each client knows what needs to be handled first and what can wait a bit.

Sometimes we will recommend that you clean things up before building any links

If we are taking over the link building for an established site where link work has been done by another company or by the client, we usually recommend investing in a link audit so that we can properly take the time to know what we’re building onto the back of as there can be many problems lurking in your profile. Sometimes we will recommend that you clean things up before building any links. Many clients have us perform link audits when there aren’t any known penalties though, just to get an idea of how their profiles look. Usually when Google has a big update, we are flooded with audit requests from clients who have not yet seen any reduction in rankings or traffic, but they want to play it safe.