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Part two of our series on “How To Conduct A Link Audit”
This video will focus on the ways in which to collect and analyse link data, and focus’s on aspects such sitation flow, trust flow , and the quality of back links.
Transcript:
“Hello and welcome to the second part of our series on how to conduct a link audit. In the first part of the series we gave you a brief overview of the whole process right from collecting the data up to using the data. Today were going to hone in a little bit more on collecting the data. We use Majestic SEO, I know a lot of other people do as well so we’re going to focus on that in this video. If you use one of the other popular services then they do pretty much the same thing, it’s just a case of the user interface and how they collect the data, so this will be still relevant just be aware there are some differences.
The first thing to do when you are using Majestic is to grab your sites URL, put it in that search box, and hit explore, once you’ve done that Majestic will present a list of the top line data on the site including things like your anchor text distribution, the domains that are pointing to your site and a couple of other charts and graphs.
One of the things I particularly like to have a look at, particularly if the site has got a Google penalty, is the graph that shows sitation flow and trust flow. The metrics aren’t foolproof so you need to take them with a pinch of salt. However if a site has got very large slant towards sitation flow it can tend to be an indication that the sites got back links from sites that a very SEO specific such as directory links or private blog networks, so those are the things you kind of want to have a look in into if you have seen that your sites got a lot of sitation flow.
Once you’ve had a brief overview of those metrics you want to pull a CSV export and open it up in excel so that you can start doing a bit more digging into the data. What we tend to do is actually customise the columns to fit our own needs. So some things you think are less important, you might also want to add in new columns. Some of the things we add in are columns so that we can actually analyse the number of anchor texts within the profile to get an idea for the concentration of particular anchor text variations. We also add in a range of columns that allow us to categorize links if we think a lot of links are bad, so we’ll have a column that says is a links good, and will also have a few different columns for varying levels of bad links, so right at the top of the list we’ll have links from private blog networks, right the way down to things like spammy directories, which are bad links but not particularly problematic when compared to directory links, so those are the things you might want to look at disavowing.
The next stage really is to actually move onto looking through the data and conducting an analysis which we will move onto in the next video. So that’s it for now, don’t forget to subscribe and the next video will be with you the same time next week. “
