Most audits export 50,000 rows from one tool and stall. The problem is that link counts are meaningless without knowing which links Google actually still sees, and third party indexes keep dead links in their data for months after the page has gone. You need a profile view that separates live earned links from expired, self made and scraped noise before you judge anything.
WHEN TO REACH FOR THIS
Use when you inherit a site and need to know whether its link profile is an asset, a liability, or mostly noise.
backlink-profile-audit.md
---
name: backlink-profile-audit
description: Use when you inherit a site and need to know whether its link profile is an asset, a liability, or mostly noise.
---
# Backlink Profile Audit
Most audits export 50,000 rows from one tool and stall. The problem is that link counts are meaningless without knowing which links Google actually still sees, and third party indexes keep dead links in their data for months after the page has gone. You need a profile view that separates live earned links from expired, self made and scraped noise before you judge anything.
## What you need first
- exports from at least two link indexes so you can spot index specific ghosts
- Search Console link report as the only Google verified sample
- a list of the site's own properties, PR agencies and past SEO vendors
## Method
1. Merge the exports and dedupe to one row per linking domain, keeping the strongest link per domain - domain count is the unit that matters, per link counts just inflate whatever the site has most of.
2. Recrawl every linking URL yourself and mark link still present, page 404, link removed, or page noindex. Expect 20 to 40 per cent of a two year old export to fail this check.
3. Tag each surviving domain by how it was acquired: editorial, directory, forum or profile, guest post, syndicated press release, sponsored, or unknown.
4. Cross reference against Search Console - a domain that no index shows but Search Console does is real, and a domain no crawler can reach is not worth arguing about.
5. Chart referring domains by first seen date and look for vertical spikes; a month that added 300 domains from one country or one footprint is a campaign, not growth, and should be inspected link by link.
6. Write the profile up as three numbers: live editorial domains, live but low value domains, and dead. Any recommendation you make from here refers to the first number only.
## What this produces
A deduped, recrawled linking domain table tagged by acquisition type and live status, with three headline counts.
## Where this goes wrong
- treating total backlinks as the metric when one site wide footer link can produce 40,000 of them
- trusting a third party index's live flag instead of crawling the page yourself
- judging a link by a proprietary authority score alone rather than whether the page has any traffic or its own links
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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/backlink-profile-audit
Free to download · no account, no email
A deduped, recrawled linking domain table tagged by acquisition type and live status, with three headline counts.