Link Profil

The link profile is an indicator that proves to the search engine the quality or character of external links pointing to a page or website. Google takes this element into account to examine any artificial links in order to detect and discourage any procedure leading to abusive referencing.

Getting a good ranking on search engines is not an easy task. It is often necessary to employ the right SEO techniques like choosing the right keywords and acquiring the right backlinks.

But sometimes, the links used for SEO are from fraudulent practices. The link profile or link profile then allows search engines to ensure the clarity and relevance of the links used

But then :

• What does a link profile really mean?
• Why should a website have a good profile link?
• How to create a good profile link?
• What tools should you use to analyze your links?

Through this article, you will find relevant answers to the different questions asked above. Let’s start!

Chapter 1: Link profile – What is it about?

Google treats all the links that are presented to it with rigor. In this chapter, I will explain in depth what a link profile means. After that, I will give you the real importance of having a good link profile.

1.1) What is a link profile?

According to Mark Jackson, apart from the total amount of inbound links, the link profile is also composed of the following three elements:

• The types of links leading to a website;
• The anchor text of these links;
• The way the links are obtained.

These elements are factors that Google takes into account to filter the links that are submitted. This allows it to keep the referencing as clean and clear as possible

In fact, Google goes beyond simply evaluating the number of inbound links to a site, with the sole purpose of preventing SEOs from using aggressive or artificial link building methods

These techniques are designed to thwart search engine rankings. It is most often the purchase of several high quality links, and put online all simultaneously

To clearly understand the subject, let me detail what we put in the three compositions of a link profile listed a little above:

1.1.1. The types of links leading to a website

The focus here is on quality. It is important that your inbound links come from legal and authoritative sources. Here, relevance is also important. The links you point to your site should have the same context as the pages that are linked to.

It’s common to see publishers put a bad link just because it’s a link. It’s true that acquiring links even from irrelevant sources may seem interesting, but this can hurt your SEO

If you act on the long term, by acquiring only relevant and good quality links, you ensure a sustainable SEO and put confidence in the search engines.

1.1.2. The anchor text of the links

If you are just starting to create links, the anchor text is nothing more than the text that is clicked on to access a link. It is a text that usually includes either:

• The keyword ;
• The name of the company or the website;
• Or any other mention.

For example, you can expect a link with the anchor text “Apple” to take you to the Apple brand website

Or a link with the anchor text “office supplies” will take you back to an office supplies page.

According to some SEO experts, anchor texts with exact matches are the ones whose sites get very good rankings

But when there are a lot of inbound anchor text links, all stuffed with keywords pointing to your site, it can look like spam or artificial links. Google does not hesitate to penalize this. In other words, too much exact match anchor text can potentially cause a penalty in the long run.

However, there is an exception. It concerns exact match links whose anchor text is nothing more than a brand name. This is indeed considered as natural links by search engines.

In general, the goal of your link profile is variety in anchor text. Some anchor texts that exactly match their link and are packed with keywords can be accepted. However, you should also make sure that your anchor texts are :

• Diluted anchor texts;
• Branded anchor texts;
• URL anchor texts;

The more you vary your anchor text, the more natural the inbound link profile you are trying to create. We will go into more detail in the second chapter.

1.1.3. How links are obtained

Google does not like paid links and has stated this in its guidelines. Here are some examples of link systems that can have a negative effect on the ranking of your site

• Buying or selling links that transmit pagerank: consists of exchanging money for links, or for articles containing links ;
• Exchanging goods and services for links: this also includes sending a free product to an individual in exchange for a link or an article about that product.

However, I do not intend to support either of these practices. Indeed, if your intention is not to pay for links, you have absolutely no reason to worry.

However, if you do want to buy links, I would advise you to be very careful about doing so and not to do so blatantly. You should first develop natural links, then create quality content, then come to the link buying stage.

On the other hand, if you appear out of nowhere with dozens, hundreds or thousands of new links, there is reason to wonder

As you have just understood, buying links is not always a bad thing. Only that you should have a well-defined objective at the end. The question you should ask yourself before embarking on any link buying process is whether these links will bring value to the internet users.

1.2. importance of having a good link profile for SEO

Before we go any further, it’s important that I explain how important your link profile is. Since Google rolled out Penguin 2.0 in 2013, the link story has completely changed.

Here is a graphic representation developed by industry experts that designates how important a website’s link profile is

Source: quicksprout

According to the graph below, the link profile is one of the main indicators that the Google algorithm takes into account to rank a website.

The penalties and sanctions that Google imposes are in most cases based on the link profiles of websites. The things that have the most impact on a site’s positive ranking are inherently related to the site link profile.

So, all these things show that a link profile is very important for an SEO. And that’s why it’s good to create one. Not just any link profile, a perfect one

But how do you go about creating such link profiles? That’s what we’ll see in the next chapter.

Chapter 2: How to get a good link profile?

It is true that backlinks are the most important elements of SEO. Some go as far as to say that there can be no ranking without backlink.

However, focusing only on backlinks and forgetting the other aspects of the link profile would be a real mistake. Backlinks are indeed only a part of the link profile. So we will see the characteristics that prove that a link profile is perfect.

Source : Key Areas of Building A Positive Link Profile – POLARIS (polarisagency.com )

Among these characteristics that make a link profile perfect, we have already mentioned some of them below, but we will go into more depth in this article, here they are:

2.1. Branded anchor text

By subdividing the level of importance of the elements that affect the ranking of a website, we will have this:

• Link profile: this is the most important element for a website’s ranking;
• Quality of backlinks: this is the most important aspect for a link profile;
• Anchor text : it’s the aspect that proves the quality of a backlinks;
• Diversity: this is the most important quality of an anchor text.

Google wants the link profile to have anchors that show diversity through the anchor texts of brands. As we have seen above, a branded anchor text consists of a text in which the anchor contains the brand name of the company

For example, if your company’s name is “Best Tourism World”, the brand anchor text could be “Best Tourism World” and would point to your website URL. It is important to know that anchors can also be diluted or combined with keywords.

As an example:

• Diluted anchor: “This company under the name of “best world tourism” is one of the leading tourism agencies” ;
• Anchor associated keyword: “A destination, safari in South Africa with the best world tourism, makes you discover the wildlife”.

2.2. Relevant semantic anchor text

The other category of diverse anchor text is semantically relevant text. You are probably familiar with Google’s semantically relevant keywords

It’s good to know that Google can make your site appear in search results, even if the queries leading to those results do not include your target keywords. This is only possible when the content of your website is similar to the keywords used in the query.

So when your link profile has anchors with semantically similar keywords, it makes the profile richer and more diverse.

Here’s what a relevant semantic anchor text might look like:

• The target keyword: “wearable heart rate sensor”;
• The relevant semantic anchor: “fitness detection technology device”.

One of your site’s blog posts might be about “wearable heart rate sensor used for marathons”. A website that deals with health can then link to this page using the semantic anchor “fitness detection technology device”

This kind of semantically relevant anchor text can help you improve your link profile.

2.3. diluted anchor text

Earlier, I used the word “diluted” as a brand anchor associated with other words or phrases. Indeed, this is an essential part of building a strong link profile. In the age of post-penguin link building, optimized anchor text is not recommended, but rather diluted anchor text

Diluted anchor text is text that contains a large number of words, some of which are related and some of which are not. Let’s use the example of a site that is trying to rank for keywords related to “heart rate monitors” or wearable electronics

A nice diluted anchor text linking to the site might look like this: would you like to put on a heart rate monitor while you sleep? Some companies are making this possible.” (The underlined sentence is the anchor text).

This represents a full sentence of anchor text. It does not consist of a keyword or even the brand name. This is not a problem. The fact that it is diluted makes it a valuable link to have in your link profile.

The inbound link profile gets more value, if it is diverse, random and diluted.

2.4. Relevance of the linking site

This is an algorithmic feature that was originally developed by Teoma, now renamed and integrated with Ask. com. It is now an integral part of the algorithm of virtually all search engines.

Ideally, your site’s backlinks should come from sites dealing with a similar topic to yours. These links must be relevant

For example, let’s say you have a site that deals with online real estate accounting. You get a backlink from a landscaping company.

That backlink from the landscaping company won’t do much to enrich your link profile. However, if you get a backlink from Realty.com, that link will be much more beneficial to your link profile.

Realty is about real estate, as is your site, but landscaping is not. It’s important to focus on sites that deal with the same content as those in your niche

2.5. Relevance of surrounding content

The concept of relevance goes one step further. In fact, a good link profile includes links with relevant content surrounding the anchor.

To better understand the concept, let’s take two examples related to the online real estate accounting company and its link to Realty.com.

example 1: The Realty.com link is provided by a page that contains an article named: “Optimal methods of staging a mansion for real estate photos”.

This link to your real estate accounting site comes from a paragraph on how to place furniture in front of wall vents

This section is not related to your main business, nor is it related to the content of your site. Although this link will help your site, it is not the most appropriate one.

example 2: The link obtained at Realty.com is from an article called “Top 15 Online Property Accounting Software Services”

Here, the link to your business is in a section that is specifically about your business. It is a branded anchor that points to an article on your blog. So this link is perfect for your link profile.

When your link points to a discussion close to your niche, it increases the value of that link for your link profile.

2.6. Link site subject to a proxy compromise

It’s important for you to understand, what I put in “link site compromised by proxy”. I am aware that this may sound a bit vague at first.

What I’m talking about in this paragraph happens when you get a link from a site that is not in itself, a spam site. However, that same site is linked to a spam site that has spam links to it. It is therefore compromised by proxy.

For the algorithm, the link obtained from this site is in a “bad neighborhood”. The fact that this site is guilty by association then reduces the value of the link

This type of site also has toxic links that point to the link requesting sites. The values attributed to these toxic links are therefore spread over your site. This negatively affects your link profile.

2.7. Freshness of links

As time passes, the performance of a link tends to decrease. When you have a link that comes from a site with an authority level of 90, with 7 years of age, it does not necessarily have the same value as a site of level 80 that was created some time ago.

An illustrative example: this site beavercreekresortproperties.com received a link from the Denver post :

Source: quicksprout

The Denver Post is assigned a high domain authority of 89. However, the link is from an article that is several years old:

Source: quicksprout

Without devaluing the site, this link does not offer the same level of value as when it was created. This situation is nicknamed the Google freshness factor. We all already know that the content of a page can become outdated over time and drop in ranking.

Just like content, links also become stale and provide less value over time. Below you’ll see how Moz illustrates the impact of the value of links from other newly created links.

Source: quicksprout

There are several other things that can also affect Google’s freshness factor. The more recent the link, the more its value increases.

2.8. Co-citation or co-occurrence

In the unique sense of the term, the co-citation is not a link. However, it appears indirectly in the link ranking typography

Still called co-occurrence, the co-citation is the simple mention of a site A by site B, without there being any anchor or real links between the two. Thanks to this mention, a value is transmitted from one to the other.

So, let’s say your company called “Super Property Accounting Program” is mentioned in the New York Times. Although there are no links, there is the name of your company “Super Real Estate Accounting Program”. This is a great thing, even without the link.

Yet, things go a little further than that. Sites gain additional co-citation authority when they contain contextual keywords and links pointing to high authority sites

Let’s say you get a link from a site and that site in turn is co-cited by a high-value site. It may be that this co-citation on a single shot improves the value of the link to your site.

2.9. Authority of the linking site

This factor is essential to getting a good link profile. But I will still complete a brief description on the principle of nofollow. If your site gets a link from a high authority site, it gains value.

But for this to really work, the link you get must be a tracked link and not a link that has a nofollow tag. True, a nofollow link also has a value. But this value does not participate in the establishment of the link profile.

While browsing your website, when Google comes across a link with the nofollow tag, it proceeds as follows:

“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text through these links. In fact, using the nofollow tag has the effect of removing target links from our overall web graph.”

To find out if a link is nofollow, you can look at the source code of the page or by checking the href tag of the link.

Wikipedia, for example, usually sets all of its links to “nofollow”. You can find here its page on Google, with the link to a page of Google.com.

Source : quicksprout

Therefore, the Wikipedia link does not provide any ranking or value to Google. In any case, it’s not like it needs it.

2.10. The depth of the linked pages

It is important to know that the deeper the link is embedded in the structure of a site, the higher its value in a link profile

The fact is that often the links your site gets are directed to home pages which represent the initial tier of your website structure.

However, too many links pointing to the home page will not be as valuable as when those links are balanced by many other links pointing to deep internal pages of the site.

It is important that your deep internal pages are enriched with backlinks. Once these pages receive these backlinks, it will boost the authority of the site as a whole. This is one of the reasons why you need to have an effective content marketing strategy.

Because a content is hosted on deep pages of the site structure, which helps to create links to these internal pages.

2.11. The diversity of pages that are linked

An ideal link profile includes several linked pages. The links should not be directed only to one or two pages. But can also be directed to :

• The home page ;
• The blog page;
• The “about” page;
• The contact page;
• And other subpages.

The wider the scope of distribution of links to pages, the higher the quality of the link profile.

2.12. no link should be paid

There is no longer any doubt that paid links are simply spam. Mostly, the facts are very clear: people pay for links based on pagerank. They are exploiting pagerank and trying to get high in the rankings. It is obvious in 99% of the cases that these links are either:

• Paid ;
• Sold;
• Bought ;
• Etc.

Admittedly, there are some grey areas. Obviously, the algorithm doesn’t know the consideration you pay to link providers in exchange for the link. But in general, if the algorithm can determine that there are paid links in your link profile, it applies a penalty.

2.13. Number of links pointing to a page

The more links to a page, the better. This is because a healthy link profile contains many backlinks. But how do you get many links from the same site? Do more links from the same site add value? Certainly not.

To Google, one link from one site is interpreted the same way as tons of links from the same site. So if you get one new link from hbr.org, that’s great. But if you get twenty links from www.hbr.org, does that mean you get twenty times the value? Not really.

You want a lot of links, yes. But you want a lot of links from different sites. Having lots of links from the same site won’t hurt your link profile. But it won’t help you.

2.14. No links to article directories

Good link profiles don’t have lists of directories containing spam. Everyone in the SEO industry knows that linking to article directories is dangerous territory. I don’t recommend using article directories to build your links.

In the old days of SEO, it was pretty easy to publish a few dozen articles on an article directory site and get a good return on investment. But today, things are much more complicated.

I advocate that websites whose link profile is filled with such links go to the article directory and remove said links.

It is important to have a healthy link profile for the best ranking of websites, but also to avoid frustrating penalties from Google

However, in order to keep your link profile up to date on all levels, you need to perform thorough and regular analysis of your link profile. How do you do this? Let’s take a look at that together in the next chapter.

Chapter 3: Knowing the Basics of Performing Link Profile Analysis

Effectively analyzing your link profile is essential maintenance that your site needs to survive. It can also contribute significantly to the strategic and technical elements of your domain.

On the strategic side, a link analysis can help you identify the deficiencies your site is suffering from in order to find appropriate solutions. The strategic analysis of the link profile will also play a crucial role in the success of your SEO strategy.

Read: the 05 steps to a successful SEO strategy.

On the technical side, a link analysis will help you identify bad links that can potentially negatively influence your website, not to mention the greater impact if you create many more bad links.

Doing an effective analysis and finding the right tools for the job is essential. Sometimes you can use several different tools at once to compile and correct all the links.

In this chapter I will show you what a link profile analysis really is, what it is used for, and the various link analysis tools to make your link strategy successful in order to have a flawless link profile.

3.1. what is a link analysis?

A link analysis simply means a thorough audit of all the links pointing to your website, which is your entire link profile.

Depending on the purpose of your link analysis, it can help you uncover the major issues that affect the SERP performance of your entire site

No matter if it is nicknamed, link correction, link review or link analysis, they all mean the same thing. Depending on your link provider, the link analysis may basically include a link profile disavowal file. You can then upload this file to Google’s disavowal tool.

Continuously analyzing links will ensure that your site’s link profile is healthy.

3.2. Why perform a link analysis?

Link analysis comes into play when you are concerned about the quality of your link profile in general and want to maintain that quality over the long term.

If your link profile has insignificant numbers of bad links, you don’t really need to perform a link analysis. This is because it is more work than you have to maintain.

On the other hand, if you find that your link profile has a high number of bad links, and you feel that you are a constant target of negative SEO campaigns, then you can start a regular program to remedy these links.

The analysis will be done based on the size of your link profile. Either once a month or once a quarter.

There may be times when continuous link analysis is more appropriate to discover and remedy evolved negative SEO campaigns. However, these scans are not always necessary and could prove to be excessive for some small websites.

Read: Negative SEO and the best way to defend against it

3.3. Adopt a link analysis tool adapted to the task

Several analysis tools are available on the market to help you measure links and track metrics. Before knowing the exact direction of your link collection campaign, you should first understand the current state of your website’s link profile.

Embarking on link acquisition before trying to understand what your site’s link profile looks like is like eating raw food before it’s cooked. Absurd, isn’t it?

And even though some raw food is delicious, you shouldn’t always take this approach, as you may suffer from severe stomach aches. The same principle is applied to the acquisition of links

If you ignore the current state of your link profile and instead seek to obtain links, you may not get the full value of your link acquisition efforts. In addition, you will be duplicating your efforts.

Using multiple link analysis tools simultaneously is necessary to assess the size of the link database.

But let’s be clear about one thing: external link analysis tools are not the keystone, although they can help you get close

Indeed, none of these tools will be able to replicate Google’s entire link database. However, they can help you remove enough negative links so that they don’t interfere with the success of your SEO efforts.

3.4. Links to watch out for and fix

Whether you believe it or not, there are good links and bad links. A good link is one that contributes to the improvement of your E.A.C. (Expertise, Authority and Trust). A bad one is the one that causes either the direct collapse of your site’s ranking or indirect difficulties in the SERP performance of your website. Or, it could be a link that is contrary to Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Google’s webmaster guidelines consider fraudulent links to be against their rules:

“Any link intended to manipulate a site’s PageRank or ranking in Google’s search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s attributed webmaster guidelines. This includes any behavior to manipulate links to your site or links out of your site.”

Your link remediation task is to find all of these types of links that point back to your site and conduct a process to remove these links and disavow them.

There are many circumstances that should cause you to deal with these types of links immediately, these are:

3.4.1. Manual action or algorithmic penalty

Manual actions are easy to spot. In a manual action, the website is manually penalized. If this happens, you will receive an alert from Google in the CMS

You may also notice a drastic drop in traffic overnight. There is not much you can do to fix this problem immediately. It will take a lot of effort to rectify, remove and disavow links before you get Google’s satisfaction.

Algorithm devaluations on the other hand are simpler, although they can be more difficult at some levels than manual actions. When there is a manual action, we at least know that we have a penalty and the actions to be taken to correct it.

But when it is an algorithmic degradation, it takes more effort and time to uncover the problem. Also the cause of the traffic drop is not always determined at this level.

3.4.2. Negative SEO attack

You have to keep in mind that negative SEO is still going on. Several examples online prove the existence of negative SEO. In most cases, negative SEO attacks are not quickly noticeable, but they end up being noticeable sooner or later. And the consequences are often devastating.

The principle of negative SEO is relatively clear: a clever rival has decided to build thousands of bad links to your site, which causes your site to drop in the SERPs.

In general, negative SEO itself is easy to identify thanks to analysis tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. These help you easily see the increase in bad links to your site.

There are many different ways to recognize an attack. Among them are:

• Creating large-scale spam-like links to your own site;
• Designing artificial sites on other domains and placing thousands of pages of duplicate content that you yourself have scraped and that link back to your site;
• Hack your site’s robots.txt file to get it de-indexed;
• Fake social profiles and fake negative online sentiment based on social signals;
• Fraudulent private affiliate networks (PBNs) to give the impression that you are engaged in this type of approach;
• Negative site referencing due to site hacking.

Most of these practices, once successful, become very complicated to spot for the inexperienced web entrepreneur. Fortunately, there are savvy SEO services to counteract them

3.4.3. Pages and folders – not limited to the whole site

An algorithmic devaluation is not only about the whole site, but also about pages and folders that seem particularly spammy.

When you notice that your traffic has dropped overnight, this algorithmic devaluation may be due to a single page that was driving most of your online traffic.

In the same vein, folders are also susceptible to algorithmic devaluation, especially, if the pages within them are particularly harmful or have spam.

This means that if you are experiencing an algorithmic devaluation, Google Analytics and Google Search Console statistics will allow you to determine which types of pages and folders are being targeted, rather than going after your entire site.

3.5. The best ways to perform link profile analysis: analysis tools.

The ideal way to do a link analysis is simply to use at least 5 different link sources, which will be grouped into a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will then serve as the foundation for your link analysis efforts.

The combination of at least 5 link sources allows you to cast as wide a net as possible to collect all potential links. This list can then be narrowed down to create a single list that will serve you throughout your process.

If you do not do this, you may miss some items that you will need to address later. So make your list as complete as possible from the start and avoid duplication.

So here are the best tools for an ideal link profile analysis, from required to optional:

3.5.1. Google search console: mandatory link analysis tool

It is important to know that Google search console should be the link analysis tool that you absolutely must use

The only problem with Google search console is that it will not find all your links. That’s why I recommend you to have at least 2 to 3 tools in your closet to analyze links.

Of course with Google search console, you can know all the links that Google considers valuable for any link analysis effort. This is the importance of google search console tool

However, it should not be the only link analysis tool used for your link analysis tasks.

3.5.2. Ahrefs: optional link analysis tools

Having such a complete and accurate link database, Ahrefs is the tool of choice for SEOs who want to analyze large amounts of links. Apart from that, it is possible to expand your link acquisition possibilities by employing the various exploitable techniques presented below:

• Possibility to exploit content opportunities by studying the most visited pages of your competitor’s sites;
• You can study your competitors’ link acquisition methods and then duplicate their link acquisition strategies;
• You can use alerts to automate the discovery of new link opportunities;
• You can determine which keywords have low competition and high traffic potential;
• You can monitor your site and determine the major SEO mistakes that are negatively impacting your site in Google;
• Look for gaps in your content strategy using the content gap analysis feature;

These are just a few of the additional features you can achieve with Ahrefs. But that’s not all. I love Ahrefs for its comprehensiveness and ease of use in terms of its ability to audit and discover new link opportunities. It is one of the best tools for acquiring links.

3.5.3. SEMrush: optional link analysis tool

Semrush is recognized as one of the most powerful SEO tools for several reasons. It allows you to fully customize your link acquisition plan from the start, starting with the easiest opportunities to get, and then working your way up to the most difficult links.

In addition to its usual list of features you can use, there are other little-known features you may not have considered when using SEMrush for link analysis:

• It is possible to identify and remove harmful links very quickly;
• From the scans, you can recover everything you lost, including your links;
• You can get rid of all your toxic links;

Although you get rid of the toxic links, there will still be cases where you will see an increase in the toxicity levels of your link profile

SEMRush’s service also gives you the ability to set up alerts for any negative SEO attacks.

SEMrush’s tools program is not only limited to link analysis, but also includes:

• Content Marketing;
• Social media;
• And many other aspects of SEO.

I highly recommend SEMrush as another tool to have in your SEO link analysis equipment.

3.5.4. Majestic: optional link analysis tools

Majestic is a must-have link analysis tool. With this tool, you have an easier time exporting your links and putting them into a format that is usable and readable.

Here are some lesser known steps of link analysis with Majestic tool that will allow you to check all potential links that may be bad links :

• Its bad neighbor check feature will allow you to thoroughly scan for links matching a shared IP, or even the same IP;
• With the latest version of Majestic, you get the context of the words and images surrounding the links! This is a major advance in overall link analysis capabilities;
• Like all link analysis tools, Majestic obviously uses domain authority metrics, called trust flow and citation flow.

3.6. How to react to a drop in traffic?

When you notice a drop in traffic that is not clearly a manual penalty or algorithmic devaluation, it is important to analyze and determine whether this drop is really due to a penalty or algorithmic devaluation.

Just because you have experienced a significant drop in traffic does not automatically constitute an algorithmic devaluation. You may have lost a crucial link that was generating significant traffic.

It may be that a page has changed, significantly altering your results. It is also possible that a page has changed, significantly altering your results

Or maybe the search query has changed and people aren’t doing much searching on that term anymore, resulting in less traffic.

To find out what the real problem is, you’ll need to answer the following questions:

• When did the drop occur?
• Did the drop in traffic coincide with an algorithm update?
• Did the traffic drop occur when other major changes were made to the site?
• Did the site potentially suffer from the loss of a critical link?
• Could the traffic have been gained otherwise?
• Has the page been substantially modified to be more polluting than it was?

It is therefore essential to perform this type of analysis first to find out what really caused the drop in traffic

In case the analysis indicates that you are devalued by the algorithms, then you will have to continue with the project of analyzing and rectifying the links in order to identify and remove the faulty links.

3.7. Link analysis can highlight weaknesses as well as strengths

A link analysis alone can help you discover relevant data about your site’s link profile

Even if you are not penalized or devalued, regular link analysis can be a great help, especially in ensuring that you do not have complications due to toxic links in your site’s link profile.

Summary

The link profile is an important element for a website and its SEO. It is an indicator that Google takes into account to assess the quality of a site and judge the naturalness of links pointing to this site. It is therefore not a simple backlink as many people consider it.

The link profile therefore has a major influence on SEO, hence the need to have good link profiles. A good link profile has several characteristics that I took the time to mention in this article

You can have for example: the brand anchor text, the authority of the linking site, the number of links pointing to your site, etc.

To keep a link profile perfect, it is important to regularly perform a thorough analysis of the links on the profile. This analysis is done with SEO tools that are specially designed for link profile analysis

I have therefore taken the time to list each tool with its advantages and characteristics.

Finally, you should know that all these steps to make the link profile better makes sense, because it allows you to avoid Google penalties

I hope this article has been useful for you to understand the link profile

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to mention them in comments

Thanks and see you soon!