A link audit is a structured review of the links pointing to a site. The goal is to understand what the profile looks like, find links that could cause trouble, recover value that has leaked through broken pages, and identify gaps against competitors. A good audit often ends with very little cleanup, because Google ignores most junk links on its own.
When to run one
Audits are worth running when something has changed or is about to.
- You received a manual action for unnatural links
- You inherited a site or an agency's past link building
- You are planning a migration or domain change
- Rankings shifted and you want to rule out link issues
- You are planning a link building program and need a baseline
Steps in a typical audit
Export links from Search Console and at least one third-party tool, then combine and deduplicate by referring domain. Sort by domain and look for patterns rather than judging thousands of links one by one.
- Find links pointing to 404 pages and redirect those URLs
- Flag clusters of paid, exchanged or network links
- Review anchor text for repeated exact-match phrases
- Check for sitewide footer or widget links you or partners created
- Note the best linked pages and the types of links competitors have that you do not
Deciding what to do
Google's guidance is that most sites never need to disavow links. Disavow is meant for cases where you have a manual action, or where you have a significant number of spammy or artificial links that you created or that were created on your behalf and that could lead to one. Fixing broken pages that still have links, and keeping the profile growing with good links, usually does more than cleanup.
Example
An audit before a rebrand
An illustrative support desk vendor, Helmquarry, is moving to a new domain. Its audit finds that a set of old integration guides, removed last year, still has links from developer blogs. Those URLs now return 404. Mapping them to current guides before the move recovers that value. The audit also finds a small cluster of old paid directory links, which the team requests removal for.
Common mistakes
Relying on tool toxicity scores
Third-party toxicity labels are vendor guesses. Review the flagged links before acting.
Disavowing as routine maintenance
Disavowing good links by mistake can remove value. Use it only for the cases Google describes.
Questions
A light review each quarter is common. A full audit makes sense around migrations, manual actions or a new link building program.
