Written by L.K. Monu Borkala, Founder, OneCity Technologies (CIN: U72100KA2009PTC048911), Bangalore. 22 years in business. +91 99023 30233.
A website is made of many parts of which links are a important section. These links can broadly be divided into external links and internal links. Either are important, but SEOs may tend to give more attention to external links, commonly known as backlinks. Websites need links, especially backlinks and link building is a major part of SEO. Links are so important that it is one of the top factors that search engines look into when ranking websites. Given its importance, every website must have a link-building strategy. But before you update your link-building strategy or use a new strategy, you’ll need to run a website backlink analysis. By making a backlink analysis, you’ll get an idea of your website standing and what steps need to be taken to further improve it.
What Is Backlink Analysis?
Backlink analysis may be defined as a detailed review of a website’s backlinks which helps in analyzing the site’s performance and identifies issues having a direct effect on the website’s search engine rankings. Simply put, backlink analysis in SEO is a regular activity carried out to check if there’s anything wrong with the website SEO. By the end of the process, you’ll know your site’s health and find out the factors contributing to its ranking. Sometimes you may find a sharp dip in your website ranking. Or your website is not doing the progress you’ve been expecting. This is when you use backlink analysis to find out what’s causing the issue with the website. Besides, the analysis will also show how your website is measuring up against your competitors. In the process, you’ll also find the strategies that they are using and what can be implemented in your strategy.
How to Do a Backlink Analysis?
1. Analyze Competitor Websites
Yes, you first need to analyze your website. But you won’t get a clear picture of where you stand without comparing yourself with your competitors. So you need to choose some top competitor websites and review them as well. Generally, you would know who your competition is, but if you don’t, just pick up sites that offer similar services or products. Check for websites outranking you for your target keywords.
2. Choose an Auditing Tool
Manual backlink analysis is possible but it’s only more efficient to make use of a backlink tool that already has the required built-in features you require. This will save time and increase accuracy. There are numerous backlink checker tools that have different capabilities relative to their price tag. Usually, SEO tools like Majestic and SEMrush have backlink analysis in them. Some recommended backlink analysis tools are Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and MOZ.
3. Run a Quick Overview
After you’ve finalized your website backlink analysis tool it’s time to start the analysis. Just enter the domain name into the search bar and check the results. The search will give you a ton of data, but observing three metrics will give you a quick idea of how your site is performing. First, check for the total number of backlinks pointing to the site. If this number is low, then it might be the reason why the website is getting ranked low. Then check for the referring domains, which means, the total number of websites that are pointing to your site. Sort these domains based on their authority and you’ll know how much your ranking depends on these pages. Besides, it also gives you ideas for future outreach. Finally, check for the top linked pages on your site. Websites have certain pages that get the most backlinks. This is an indication of what type of content works best for link building. Having conducted these steps on your website, repeat them with your competitors. This will help in setting a benchmark and finding out where and what you lack.
4. Detail Analysis
You’ve got the data, now start the in-depth analysis. This is when you look at metrics and find answers to your questions. Start with a check for spammy backlinks for they may be hurting your ranking. This check is done by looking at your anchor texts. Note that the anchor text of spammy referral domains includes crude language and typically resembles the junk section of your email. You can reach out to such websites and request them to be removed but an easier way would be to tell Google to ignore those backlinks. That is, you are disavowing those links. Further, you will need to look at your country code top-level domain (ccTLD) distribution. This is necessary to identify websites indulging in malicious practices meant to negatively impact your SEO. A simple example would be getting a load of traffic from Haiti, which would be a .ht backlink. This is a red flag. You might also get unfamiliar TLD, which will need deeper analysis. Simply put, it is suspicious if a website on cricket attracts too many backlinks from Russia. Last but not the least, hunt and repair broken and lost links. Such links can cause a loss of link juice, which is the sharing of authority from a higher rank page to a lower rank or new page on the website. Broken or lost links also impede the functioning of search engine spiders crawling to find new information and indexing.
5. Know What Your Competitors Are Doing
In your analysis of your domain, you explore deeper and gather more information. Meanwhile, you also need to compare your findings with your competitors. Comparing with other websites will weed out certain factors that will give an idea or direction for your domain to aim at. also, the comparison also shows the backlink acquisition rate of your website w.r.t. your competitors. It shows who is growing and at what pace.
6. Backlink Profile Analysis
Your website’s backlink profile has a direct effect on your website’s position in the search, its authority, and the site’s quality. Search engines use links as votes or endorsements for a website, and that is one of the chief factors that decide website ranking. Your website grows stronger and ranks higher when you have more trusted domains in your backlink profile. Domain diversity and quality backlinks are essential to achieving good SERP. so, website backlink analysis is very important and will help in creating a smart link-building strategy.
7. Backlink Gap Analysis
SEO is a very active field with search engines updating their rules frequently. Thus SEO tactics have become more sophisticated and backlink gap analysis is a result of this hard competition. It is a part of competitive analysis in SEO. Backlink gap analysis analyzes your competitors’ external link profiles to identify backlink gaps which essentially means finding backlinks present in your competitors’ external profiles but not in yours. Simply put, it gives a list of websites that have links to your competitor’s websites but not yours. This does not mean you should aim to get all the websites that link to your competitors. During analysis, you’ll find websites that may link to two of your competitors. What you need to check is if those links are relevant to your website. If not, then simply ignore them. Not all links are valuable and only a few valuable links can strike gold. So aim to get such backlinks through backlink analysis. Then get in touch with the webmasters but with a concrete plan. Start the ball rolling with an email. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t, but your proposal must give the recipient some value. Also bear in mind to get straight to the point. Be short and concise and do not waste the recipient’s time.
Conclusion
to wrap up, backlink analysis is an essential part of your SEO strategy and cannot be ignored. Besides, it requires continuous maintenance. This article is a perfect guide about conducting a backlink analysis, but you can always make use of professional services to get the best efficiency and results. Get in touch with the experienced SEO team of OneCity and have all your SEO concerns resolved with complete satisfaction. You May Also Like Difference Between On-Page and Off-Page SEO
Expert insight from L.K. Monu Borkala: Backlinks remain one of Google’s top three ranking signals alongside content and RankBrain — Ahrefs’ analysis of 1 billion pages found that 91% of pages get zero organic traffic from Google, and the primary differentiator between pages that rank and those that do not is the number and quality of referring domains (Ahrefs Search Traffic Study). For Bangalore businesses, acquiring backlinks from Karnataka-based business associations, local news outlets (Deccan Herald, The Hindu Bangalore), and industry directories provides both domain authority and local relevance signals that national links cannot replicate. Google’s own guidance confirms that link building through genuine value creation — case studies, original research, expert quotes — is the only sustainable approach post the March 2024 and August 2025 Spam Updates (Google Search Central — Links and Ranking).
Reference sources: Google link proven methods.
What Backlink Analysis Actually Tells You
A backlink analysis is not just a count of how many sites link to you. Done properly, it answers four questions: which pages on your site have the most external authority, where does that authority come from, what gaps exist compared to competitors, and whether any links in your profile pose a penalty risk. Each answer drives a different action.
At OneCity Technologies, backlink analysis is the first task we complete when onboarding a new SEO client. The link profile tells us more about a site's ranking ceiling than any other single data source — more than keyword rankings, more than traffic data, and more than on-page optimisation scores.
Step 1: Crawl Your Backlink Profile
Start with Ahrefs Site Explorer or SEMrush Backlink Analytics. Enter your domain and export the full backlink report — every referring page, anchor text, link type (dofollow/nofollow), first seen date, and the referring domain's authority score.
For a site that has been active for 3+ years, this report may contain thousands of rows. Do not attempt to evaluate every link individually. The goal of the initial crawl is to get the full picture before filtering down to what matters.
Key metrics to note from the overview before exploring the detail:
- Referring domains vs total backlinks: A site with 200 referring domains and 210 backlinks has a natural link profile. A site with 50 referring domains and 4,000 backlinks likely has a manipulation problem — multiple links from the same low-quality sources.
- Domain Rating / Domain Authority distribution: What proportion of your referring domains have a DR above 30? Above 50? High-authority links carry disproportionate ranking weight.
- Link acquisition rate over time: Is your link profile growing steadily, spiking irregularly, or declining? Sudden spikes can indicate a link scheme or viral content moment. Steady growth is the healthiest pattern.
- Dofollow vs nofollow ratio: A natural link profile contains a mix of both. If 95%+ of your links are dofollow, it may indicate unnatural link building. If 95%+ are nofollow (common for heavily social-media-dependent sites), your links are contributing less PageRank than they could.
Step 2: Assess Link Quality
Not all links contribute equally to rankings, and some actively harm them. Quality assessment requires looking at each referring domain through several lenses.
Topical Relevance
A link from a digital marketing publication to an SEO agency carries more topical authority than a link from a food blog. Google's Reasonable Surfer model weights links based on the probability that a user would actually follow them — a user reading about SEO is more likely to follow a link to an SEO agency than a user reading a recipe. Topically relevant links from within your industry are worth significantly more than high-authority links from completely unrelated domains.
For OneCity, links from Indian business publications covering digital marketing, technology industry sites, startup media, and Karnataka business news are all topically relevant. A link from a foreign casino site or a cooking blog, regardless of its domain authority score, provides minimal ranking benefit.
Traffic and Engagement of Referring Domains
Domain Authority scores (Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, SEMrush AS) are useful proxies but imperfect. A better signal is whether the referring domain actually receives organic traffic. A site with DR 60 but zero organic traffic — common with expired domains repurposed purely for link selling — provides less value than a DR 35 site with 10,000 monthly organic visitors and a real editorial team.
In Ahrefs, filter your referring domains by organic traffic above 1,000 monthly visits. The links from this filtered list are your genuinely valuable links.
Anchor Text Distribution
Anchor text is the clickable text of a hyperlink. Natural link profiles have varied anchor text — brand name, URL, generic terms (“click here,” “read more”), partial match keywords, and exact match keywords. Over-optimised anchor text — where 40%+ of links use exact-match commercial keywords — is a pattern Google's algorithm has targeted since the original Penguin update in 2012.
Analyse your anchor text distribution and identify whether exact-match commercial anchors (“SEO company Bangalore,” “digital marketing agency”) are disproportionately represented. If they are, future link acquisition should focus on brand, URL, and natural anchors to rebalance the profile.
Step 3: Identify and Handle Toxic Links
Toxic links are links from sources that Google's spam classifier has either penalised or would penalise if a manual reviewer examined your profile. Common characteristics:
- Links from sites in completely unrelated niches with no editorial content — pure link farms
- Links from foreign-language sites with no logical reason to link to an Indian business
- Links from sites with extremely low organic traffic and high spam scores in Ahrefs or SEMrush
- Links from private blog networks — sites that exist purely to distribute link equity with no genuine audience
- Large clusters of links acquired in a short time window — often indicates a purchased link package
The first step with suspicious links is to attempt removal. Contact the site owner with a polite request to remove the link. Keep records of outreach attempts — date, contact method, response or lack thereof.
If removal is not possible and you have strong evidence the links are causing or risking a penalty, Google's Disavow Tool in Search Console allows you to formally request that Google ignore specific links when assessing your site. The disavow tool should be used cautiously — incorrectly disavowing legitimate links can harm rankings. Use it only for links you are confident are spammy and cannot be removed organically.
Important caveat: most sites with some low-quality links do not need to disavow. Google's algorithm is generally good at ignoring low-quality links without them actively counting as negative signals. The disavow tool is for situations involving manual actions or clear patterns of manipulative links, not routine cleanup of directory submissions and incidental low-quality links.
Step 4: Competitor Backlink Gap Analysis
The most practical output of a backlink analysis is not your own link profile — it is the gap between your profile and your top-ranking competitors. If a competitor ranks above you for your target keyword, their link profile almost certainly tells you why.
Use Ahrefs Link Intersect or SEMrush Backlink Gap tool. Enter your domain and two or three competitors. The tool shows domains that link to your competitors but not to you — these are your highest-priority link acquisition targets because they have already demonstrated willingness to link to sites in your category.
For a Bangalore digital marketing agency, competitor gap analysis consistently reveals the same pattern: industry publications covering digital marketing in India, startup and entrepreneurship news sites, Karnataka business directories, and guest post placements on marketing blogs. These are the link types worth pursuing systematically.
Replicable vs Irreplicable Links
Not every competitor link can or should be replicated. Categorise the gap links:
- Replicable: Guest posts on industry blogs, directory listings, resource page inclusions, press mentions. These can be pursued through outreach.
- Partially replicable: Links earned from original research or data studies. You cannot replicate the same study, but you can publish comparable original research that attracts similar links.
- Irreplicable: Links from personal relationships, legacy press coverage, or unique events. Note these but do not spend outreach budget chasing them.
Focus outreach effort on the replicable and partially replicable categories. Build a prospect list, prioritise by traffic and topical relevance, and begin systematic outreach.
Step 5: Analyse Your Best Link Pages
The pages on your site that attract the most links naturally reveal what your audience and industry find linkable. For most businesses, these are not the homepage and service pages — they are the in-depth guides, original data studies, and comprehensive resources that provide standalone value.
In Ahrefs, go to Best by Links to see which pages have the most referring domains. Then examine the content on those pages. What format are they? What topics do they cover? How long are they? This tells you what to produce more of.
If your most linked pages are all service pages with no informational content, your site lacks link-worthy assets. Creating a comprehensive industry guide, publishing original research, or building a free tool gives the wider web something worth linking to — something that earns links without requiring individual outreach for every single one.
Step 6: Monitor and Maintain Ongoing
Backlink analysis is not a one-time exercise. Run a quarterly review covering:
- New referring domains acquired in the quarter — are they high quality and topically relevant?
- Lost referring domains — were valuable links removed? Follow up with the site owner if appropriate.
- New anchor text patterns — is exact-match anchor text accumulating disproportionately?
- Competitor profile changes — have competitors acquired significant new links that explain ranking changes?
Set up Ahrefs alerts for new backlinks to your domain so you are notified in real time when your site earns (or loses) links. This allows immediate investigation of unusual link acquisition — whether from a positive viral moment or a negative link scheme targeting your site.
Backlink Analysis Tools: Which to Use
Ahrefs — Best Overall
Ahrefs has the most comprehensive and frequently updated backlink index available. For Indian sites, it provides better coverage of regional links than Moz or SEMrush. The Site Explorer interface is intuitive, and the Link Intersect tool for competitor gap analysis is the clearest implementation in the market. Ahrefs Lite at USD 99/month is sufficient for most individual site analyses.
SEMrush — Best for Combining Backlink and Keyword Data
SEMrush's Backlink Analytics is slightly less comprehensive than Ahrefs on link coverage but integrates backlink data with keyword position tracking and competitor analysis in a single dashboard. For agencies managing multiple clients who need an all-in-one platform, SEMrush provides better value than maintaining separate subscriptions.
Google Search Console — Free Baseline
GSC's Links report shows which sites link to you most frequently and which pages attract the most links. It does not provide authority scores or competitor data, but it is free and uses Google's own data — meaning it shows exactly what Google sees, not a third-party index approximation. Always cross-reference paid tool data against GSC.
Majestic — Best for Historical Data
Majestic's Historic Index contains backlink data going back to 2004 — further than any other tool. For investigating how a domain's link profile evolved over time, or for assessing the history of a domain before purchasing it, Majestic's historical data is unmatched. Its Citation Flow and Trust Flow metrics provide an alternative quality assessment framework to DR/DA.
Common Backlink Analysis Mistakes
Focusing on quantity over quality
Ten links from high-traffic, topically relevant, editorially controlled sites outperform 500 links from low-quality directories. A referring domain count that grows through genuine editorial placements compounds in value over time. The same count achieved through bulk directory submissions or link purchases carries penalty risk and minimal ranking benefit.
Ignoring internal links while obsessing over external links
External backlinks get most of the attention in link building discussions, but internal links are entirely within your control and often underused. A page with strong external link equity that does not pass that equity to related service pages through internal links is leaving ranking potential unrealised. Before spending ₹20,000 on external link outreach, audit your internal link structure and ensure authority is flowing to the pages that matter most.
Not checking for negative SEO
Negative SEO — competitors building spammy links to your site to trigger a penalty — is uncommon but real. Monitor your new backlinks monthly and investigate any unusual spikes in low-quality link acquisition. If you see hundreds of new links from irrelevant foreign sites appearing in a short window, this warrants investigation and potentially a proactive disavow filing.
For a professional backlink audit or ongoing link acquisition strategy for your Bangalore business, contact OneCity Technologies at +91 99023 30233. We have conducted backlink audits for businesses across Karnataka since 2017.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many backlinks do I need to rank on page one in Bangalore?
There is no universal number — it depends entirely on your target keywords and what competitors ranking above you have. For hyperlocal terms with low competition (“web design company Rajajinagar”), a handful of quality local citations may be sufficient. For competitive city-level terms (“SEO company Bangalore”), the top-ranking pages typically have 200–800 referring domains from quality sources. Competitor analysis tells you the specific target for your category.
Are nofollow links worthless for SEO?
No. Google confirmed in 2019 that nofollow links are treated as “hints” rather than strict directives — meaning Google may choose to follow and count nofollow links when its algorithm deems them trustworthy. Nofollow links from high-authority sources still contribute to brand visibility, referral traffic, and entity authority. A nofollow link from the Economic Times is more valuable than a dofollow link from a generic directory.
How often should I run a backlink analysis?
Quarterly is the minimum for most businesses. If you are actively building links or have experienced a recent ranking change, monthly analysis is appropriate. After any major Google update — particularly a spam update — run an immediate analysis to check whether new link patterns in your profile correlate with any ranking movement.
Can I recover from a Google penalty caused by bad links?
Yes, but recovery takes time. The process: identify and attempt removal of all manipulative links, disavow what cannot be removed, submit a reconsideration request through Search Console if a manual action is present, then wait. Algorithmic penalties (from SpamBrain, not a human reviewer) resolve when Google re-crawls your profile after the disavow and sees a cleaner pattern. Recovery typically takes 3–6 months after a thorough cleanup.
