Link building audit: how to evaluate a website's backlinks

What is a link building audit and what is it for?

A link building audit answers a single question: do the links pointing to this site help or harm its search performance? It's not the same as "doing link building". According to Ahrefs' study of about 14 billion pages, pages with more referring domains get more traffic — a correlation, not proof of causation (Ahrefs).

How to run a link building audit, step by step?

Step 1: extract the existing link profile (referring domains)

I always start by extracting the full list of referring domains (via Ahrefs, Semrush or Google Search Console) before judging anything. This step often reveals surprises: forgotten toxic links, broken redirects, or, on the contrary, quality domains never exploited in the content strategy.

Which backlink metrics matter: relevance, editorial links, link age

Domain rating (DR/DA) is useful but misleading on its own. What matters more: the topical relevance of the source site, whether it's an editorial link or a directory, and the age of the link. On first-page results, editorial links account for 92.2% of backlinks versus 6.8% for directories (WebFX, 2026 study of 1,462 domains) — the narrative that "directories are still enough" no longer holds.

The 5 concrete actions of a backlink audit

1. Full export of the link profile (referring domains, anchors, dates).
2. Ranking by topical relevance, not only by DR.
3. Spotting toxic or spammy links to disavow.
4. Identifying quality domains that lead nowhere (to reactivate).
5. Comparison with 2-3 direct competitors on the same queries.

On the hotel projects I've handled, this last point often changes the whole prioritisation: a competitor with half as many links but better topically targeted can outperform a bigger but generic profile.

Why the number of backlinks isn't enough

96.55% of the pages Ahrefs analysed get no traffic from Google (Ahrefs, December 2023), and the study notes that pages with more referring domains attract more traffic. A link building audit exists precisely to check that you're not building a content strategy while ignoring links, at the risk of staying among the vast majority of invisible pages.

Comparison table — what a link building audit looks at vs. ignores

Which link building analyses make the difference?

How long does a backlink last? (link rot)

A link profile is never fixed. Ahrefs analysed the link profiles of more than 2 million sites and found that 66.5% of the links created since 2013 pointing to those sites were dead (Ahrefs, link rot study). That's why a serious link building audit is never satisfied with a one-off extraction: you have to come back regularly to check that the links judged solid still are.

How many backlinks do you need to rank? Backlinko's benchmark

Backlinko's study of 11.8 million Google results shows that the first result has on average 3.8 times more backlinks than positions 2 to 10 (Backlinko). It's the order of magnitude I systematically show my clients at the start of an assignment: before discussing quality or topical relevance, you have to visualise the work needed to compete with page one — keeping in mind that it's a correlation, not a guarantee.

Should you disavow toxic backlinks with Google's tool?

Google has offered a link disavow tool for years, but I only use it as a last resort, on clearly spammy profiles and after trying to contact the webmaster directly to get a removal. Disavowing too broadly, out of excess caution, can strip value from links that, badly classified by an automatic tool, were actually relevant to the site's topic. It's a surgical gesture, not a spring clean to repeat at every audit — most of the profiles I've analysed never needed one anyway.

Keep reading: SEO audit, KPIs, tools and hotel SEO

→ What an SEO audit actually looks like — the link audit within a full audit.

→ SEO performance tracking: which KPIs to watch — tracking the effect of links over time.

→ SEO tools compared — the tools for pulling a link profile.

→ Hotel SEO: direct bookings — link building applied to a hotel.

→ SEO, my method and services — the overview page on the topic.