Backlink Audit: A Step-by-Step Process, Spreadsheet Template and Action Plan

A backlink audit is a structured review of every link pointing to your site, done to answer three questions: which links are helping you, which ones are a risk, and which opportunities you're missing. The process is the same for any site: gather links from several sources, put them in one spreadsheet, evaluate each referring domain against a fixed set of criteria, sort everything into clear classes, and take one defined action per class.

Done properly, most of the links in most audits need no action at all. The value is in the minority: the strong links you should protect and build on, the lost or broken links you can win back in an afternoon, and the handful of genuinely manipulative links that need cleaning up.

This guide gives you the complete process, a spreadsheet layout you can copy, a seven-class system for sorting links, and what to do with each class. If you're specifically worried about spammy links and disavowing, our toxic backlinks guide goes deeper on that one decision.

What is a backlink audit?

A thorough audit has three jobs, and it's worth knowing which one matters most for you before you start:

When to run a backlink audit

Some situations call for a full audit right away; for everything else, a regular rhythm is enough:

If you have a manual action, read our guide to the unnatural links penalty alongside this one; the audit is the first half of the recovery.

Step 1: Gather your link data

Every link index is incomplete. Search engines don't show you everything they know, and third-party tools only see what their own crawlers find. Combine sources to get close to the full picture:

• Google Search Console. Links → Export external links gives you a sample of links and a list of latest links. Also export Top linking sites and Top linking text.
• Bing Webmaster Tools. The Backlinks report lists referring domains and linking pages, often including links Search Console's sample leaves out.
• A third-party backlink index. Adds coverage, first-seen dates and lost-link history. One is enough; two helps on larger sites.
• Your own records. Outreach logs, agency reports, invoices, partnership agreements and any link building community dashboards. These tell you how links were obtained, which no index can.

Our guide on how to check backlinks walks through each source in more detail. Once you have the exports, merge them into one list, normalize URLs (lowercase, strip tracking parameters) and remove duplicates.

Step 2: Set up the audit spreadsheet

Work in two tabs: a Domains tab with one row per referring domain, where you make decisions, and a Links tab with one row per linking URL, where you keep the detail. Deciding domain by domain is what keeps an audit manageable. These are the columns worth having:

Links per domain (Domains tab, B2):
  =COUNTIF(Links!A:A, A2)

Followed links per domain:
  =COUNTIFS(Links!A:A, A2, Links!F:F, "followed")

Rough anchor type (Links tab, with your brand in $Z$1):
  =IF(REGEXMATCH(LOWER(D2), LOWER($Z$1)), "branded",
   IF(REGEXMATCH(D2, "^(https?://|www\.)"), "URL",
   IF(REGEXMATCH(LOWER(D2), "^(click here|here|this|website|read more)quot;),
      "generic", "keyword / other")))

Share of referring domains in your niche:
  =COUNTIF(Domains!J:J, 3) / COUNTA(Domains!A2:A)

Step 3: Evaluate each domain

Work through the Domains tab, starting with the domains that send the most links or have the highest authority. For each one, the evaluation takes a minute or two once you get into a rhythm:

1. 1

   Verify the link is live and working

   Check that the link still exists, its rel attribute, its anchor, where it sits on the page and whether the page is indexable. Our backlink checker reports all of that for any page. Links that look fine in an export are often gone, nofollowed or sitting on a noindexed page.
2. 2

   Score authority

   Run your referring domains through the website authority checker in bulk and paste the scores into the Authority column. Authority is context, not a verdict: low-authority sites in your niche are normal and often valuable.
3. 3

   Judge relevance

   Score 1 to 3: would this site's readers plausibly care about your page? Relevance matters more than authority for deciding whether a link is helping.
4. 4

   Look at the site itself

   Real content and a real audience, or thin posts with a commercial link in each one? Does it sell links? Is it part of a network with shared themes and outbound links?
5. 5

   Check the target

   Does the link point to a page that still exists and returns 200? Links to 404s or long redirect chains are opportunities, not problems.
6. 6

   Fill in origin

   Match the domain against your records. Earned, partner, outreach, paid, exchange, network or unknown.

Step 4: Classify every link

Every referring domain gets exactly one class, and every class has one action. This is what turns a spreadsheet into decisions. Here's the system and the criteria for each class:

Worked example

A fictional kitchenware store, brightkettle.example, audits 212 referring domains. After verification and review, the split looks like this:

• Strong (21): food blogs and recipe sites linking to its buying guides from inside articles.
• Keep (118): small blogs, forum mentions, social profiles and directories.
• Fix (6): links to old product URLs that now redirect through two hops.
• Reclaim (9): links to a deleted “knife sharpening angles” chart that people still cite.
• Monitor (47): scraper sites and auto-generated stats pages.
• Remove (8) and disavow (3): sponsored posts bought by a previous agency with exact-match anchors, three of them on a network that never replied.

The biggest win isn't the cleanup. It's the nine reclaim links: republishing the chart at its old URL restores links people already chose to give. Our guide to link reclamation covers that process in full.

Step 5: Analyze the profile as a whole

Individual links tell you what to fix. The profile tells you what to do next. Once every domain is classified, look at these distributions:

• Anchor mix. What share of anchors are branded, URL, generic, partial-match and exact-match? Paste your anchors into our anchor text analyzer to see the distribution and any over-optimization risk.
• Target pages. Are links concentrated on the homepage, or do your key commercial and content pages have links too? Pages that matter but have no links are your priority list.
• Relevance share. What share of referring domains score 3 for relevance? A low share means you need more links from your own niche.
• Authority spread. A natural profile has a few strong domains and many modest ones. A profile made almost entirely of one authority band often reflects one campaign.
• Followed vs nofollow. Both are normal. A profile that's almost entirely followed, keyword-anchored links is a pattern.
• Velocity. Using first-seen dates, chart new referring domains per month. Spikes that line up with past campaigns are worth a second look.
• Lost links. How many links have you lost in the past year, and from which kinds of sites? Repeated losses from one source point to a relationship problem.
• Competitor gap. Which sites link to two or more of your competitors but not to you? Our guide to competitor backlink analysis shows how to build that list.

Step 6: Turn the audit into an action plan

Prioritize by impact and effort. A sensible order for most sites:

1. 1

   Reclaim and fix (highest return, lowest effort)

   Restore or redirect pages that have links pointing at 404s, fix redirect chains, and ask for corrected URLs where a site links to an outdated page.
2. 2

   Remove and disavow (only if needed)

   If you have a manual action or known paid or network links, work through removal requests, then disavow what's left. Otherwise, skip this step.
3. 3

   Protect your strong links

   Keep the linked pages live and up to date. Thank the people who linked to you; these are the relationships that produce future links.
4. 4

   Fill the gaps the profile analysis found

   Pages with no links, low relevance share, competitor gaps and anchor imbalances become your link building priorities for the next quarter.
5. 5

   Set up monitoring

   Check new and lost links monthly, re-verify your strong links, and schedule the next full audit.

Verify a link once and it can still disappear next month. Sites get redesigned, posts get pruned and editors swap links out. That's why the monitoring step matters as much as the audit itself, and why it pays to build new links somewhere they'll be checked for you.

On HrefClub, links you receive come from niche-matched member sites, sit inside real content and are re-checked automatically. If a host removes or nofollows your link and it fails three checks, it's marked lost, your credits are refunded and the placer loses trust. Your next audit has fewer surprises.