What is link profiling?

Inbound links from other sites to yours are some of the most valuable marketing assets your site can have, especially if your business relies on online visibility. Their acquisition has always been an important part of SEO and, even though the new breed 'content marketing' agencies don't talk about links much anymore, should still be the focus of most content and owned media promotion.

The links themselves are taken as votes of confidence by Google. Generally, the greater the quality, relevance and trust held by the websites linking to you, the more favourably the search engines will rank you. And conversely, the lower the quality, the more likely you are to get hit by a Google penalty that could devastate your search engine traffic.

Your link profile should be strong, made up of good quality, naturally earned links, and clean, with no spammy, unnatural, toxic or suspicious links. Link profiling thoroughly examines every link in your profile, evaluating and classifying them according to their risk levels, value, potential and relevance. It will give you a complete understanding of your current assets and identifies any gaps you could fill – any sites out there that rightfully should be linking to you, but aren’t.

What can we do?

Our link profiling service is designed to uncover any harmful links so they can be cleaned and disavowed. It's a manual process that starts with a comprehensive index of the links pointing to your site, combining information from Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) with four enterprise-level link indexes to give us up to 95% accuracy. Our proprietary software, LinkPinglr, makes us even more precise by checking which links still exist.

Then we start building a picture of the risk and value within each link. We compile more than forty data points for every link, including placement, anchor text, site-wide links, site theme and type. The riskiest links get reviewed first, allowing us to identify patterns that help us target the next set of links.

Almost all the sites we review have unique patterns of value and risk, and we're experts at interpreting them - in fact, understanding how to use them is vital if you have tens or hundreds of thousands of links. Once all these points have been reviewed we assign risk factors to each link in the profiling spreadsheet. We can then create an action plan to determine which links should be cleaned and which should be kept.

Are you looking for a meticulous, professional analysis of your link profile? Enquire about our professional link profiling service by getting in touch or calling us on +44 (0) 3301 333480.