Backlink Audit: Find Risky Links and Protect Your Site

Your backlink profile is part of your reputation. A backlink audit shows who links to you, flags risky patterns, and helps you decide what (if anything) to fix. Here's a practical process.

This guide is part of our authority link building series.

Step 1: Collect your links

• Export links from Google Search Console
• Supplement with an SEO tool's backlink data
• Combine into one list of referring domains

Step 2: Review by domain, not link

Look at each referring domain:

• Is it relevant to your business or location?
• Does it have real content and readers?
• Is it an obvious link network, spam directory or scraper?
• How many links does it send, and with what anchor text?

Step 3: Spot risky patterns

Pattern	Why it's risky
Paid links without sponsored/nofollow	Violates Google's link spam policies
Private blog networks	Built to manipulate rankings
Many exact-match keyword anchors	Unnatural profile (anchor text)
Sitewide footer or widget links	Often part of schemes
Links from hacked or spam sites	Low trust
Sudden spikes of low-quality links	Possible negative SEO or past vendor activity

Step 4: Decide what to do

• Most spammy links: Google says its systems generally ignore them. Often, no action is needed.
• Links you control or paid for: remove them or add the correct attributes.
• Manual action for unnatural links: request removals, document efforts, consider disavowing what you can't remove, then submit a reconsideration request.
• Known manipulative links from past vendors: consider removal and, where needed, disavowal.

Use the disavow tool carefully. Disavowing good links can hurt you.

Step 5: Check your own site

• Outbound paid or sponsored links on your site should be marked appropriately
• User-generated links (comments, forums) should be marked ugc or nofollow
• Fix broken outbound links

Step 6: Monitor going forward

• Watch Search Console for manual action notices
• Review new referring domains quarterly
• Track your healthy link growth (link building metrics)

Past vendor cleanup

If a previous agency built links through schemes, get a list of what they did. Removing or neutralizing those links, and switching to earned methods, protects you long term. See should you buy backlinks? and what is link stacking?

A simple audit spreadsheet

Referring domain	Relevant?	Real site?	Anchor type	Paid?	Action
example-news.ca	Yes	Yes	Brand	No	Keep
spam-directory.xyz	No	No	Exact match	Unknown	Ignore / monitor

Keep notes on what you decided and why. It helps future audits and any reconsideration request.

Build the healthy side

The best protection is a strong profile of earned links from media, partners, associations and experts. See the Authority Stack.