How do you perform a backlink audit?

A backlink audit is the process of evaluating the backlinks pointing to a website to identify any low-quality, toxic, or harmful links that could be negatively impacting the site's search engine rankings. Here are the steps to perform a backlink audit:

1. **Collect your backlinks**: Use a backlink analysis tool like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to collect all the backlinks pointing to your website. Make sure to include links from all domains, including subdomains.

2. **Analyze the quality of the links**: Look at the quality of the websites linking to you. Consider factors like the website's domain authority, page authority, relevance to your industry, and overall trustworthiness. Also, look for any signs of manipulative or artificial link building, such as links from low-quality directories, comment spam, or private blog networks.

3. **Identify toxic links**: Use the tool's toxicity score or your own judgment to identify any links that are likely to be harmful. These might include links from websites with a low trust score, links that use exact match anchor text, or links from sites that are completely unrelated to your industry.

4. **Create a disavow file**: If you've identified any toxic links, create a disavow file listing those links. This file tells Google to ignore those links when evaluating your site's backlink profile.

5. **Submit the disavow file to Google**: Log in to Google Search Console and navigate to the "Disavow Links" tool. Upload your disavow file and submit it to Google.

6. **Monitor your backlink profile**: Regularly monitor your backlink profile to ensure that you're not accumulating any new toxic links. Use a backlink analysis tool to track your links and set up alerts for any new links that meet certain criteria, such as links from low-quality sites or links with exact match anchor text.

Remember, a backlink audit is not a one-time task, but an ongoing process. Regularly monitoring and cleaning up your backlink profile can help you maintain a healthy and natural backlink profile, which can improve your search engine rankings and traffic.