Understanding Your Link Profile: 4 Link Profile Elements To Monitor

Hey everyone, Adam here. Older brother at SEO Brothers. Welcome to our March video series where we are talking about Link Profiles, and link acquisition and we’ll take you on a high level overview of how to focus your off-page efforts to increase visibility.

In today’s video I’m going to help you better understand your link profile and talk about 4 elements you can look at to gauge the health of your link profile.

Let’s dive right in.

Number 1 – Your total number of referring domains. When looking at volume of a link profile it’s more important to look at the total number of different websites that link to you rather than the total number of links as there is a diminishing return when you receive multiple links from the same domain.

For example, having 100 websites link to yours once each is far more valuable than having one or two websites link 100 or 50 times each.This is a good comparison metric when you get into comparing your link profile to that of your competitors.

Number 2 – The ratio of do-follow and no-follow links.

Do-follow links are links that pass page rank and authority and are the majority of the links you see on the web. No-follow links do not pass any authority and are often used for sponsorship links and paid placements, or on comments and user-generate linked. Having a good ratio with more do-follow links is important to the success of your link profile.

Number 3 – Authority and Relevance of linking domains.

Authority of linking domains. Metrics such as Ahrefs’s domain rank or Moz’s Mozrank are good for this. You’ll want a mix of high authority domains that point to yours in order to provide a decent base of authority.

Arguably more important than the authority of a referring domain is how relevant it is to your website. So a link from a well-established industry resource can have much more impact than that of a general placement link from a high quality news or general website.

Number 4 – Anchor text and anchor text ratios.

Anchor Text is the word or phrase that is used within the hyperlink to link to another source. When looking at a link profile, you’ll want to see a high percentage of branded anchor text, but also a mix of URL-based anchors, page title match anchors, and even empty anchors or generic phrases like click here.

Oftentimes when we acquire strategic links to help improve visibility they will be done with anchors that are more relevant to the search phrase or keyword group we’re looking to improve visibility for. It’s fine to do this, but it’s also important that your overall percentages are in balance – you don’t want 25+ % of your anchors keyword focused with only a small percentage on brand as that is not a natural looking link profile.

So to recap, when monitoring a link profile you should be looking at the total number of linking domains, their overall authority and relevance to your or your clients’ website, and the anchor text ratio of the link profile – which is especially important if you are actively acquiring or building links.

If you have any questions about link profiles please don’t hesitate to reach out.