You may be like,” Why check links manually?” It goes without saying that you need to automate whenever possible if it does not jeopardize your link profile and online reputation. That said, you still need to do some stuff manually. For example, check links pointing to your site from third party ones. It may even sound like or actually be a really menial work, but there are times when you need to do it just because you can’t outsource that sort of activities for either security or reliability reasons. Some things are just of too high importance for a third party assistance. One of such things would be a manual backlink checkup.
Why Not Outsource
As a matter of fact, it’s not that you can’t possibly outsource it in theory. It’s just really hard to find an extremely reliable person that you absolutely trust. If your backlink profile has a whole lot of links. And you don’t have an SEO guy that you can delegate that task to, just buckle up and do that damn thing on your own. In case you do outsource it, but you’re still not exactly sure that you hired a reliable SEO dude, you’re gonna have to double-check if he did everything right. And if you want to monitor everything, it will take a whole lot of time. Now the question is why you hired that guy if you checked everything on your own anyway? Actually. you could do everything on your own in the first place.
Why Not Automate
In most cases, it’s more than perfect to automate your link profile checkup. Especially if it’s a preventing endeavour. Actually, there are other cases when you totally need to do that thing manually. Your site may just not rank high enough regardless of how you build links. You should keep in mind that on-page SEO must be in order for proper search engine rankings. Plus if you also used an automatic link checkup solution and it did not really work for you, it’s a must to double-check your site’s backlinks manually because the software that you used may just not be able to properly pinpoint problematic backlinks. Sometimes it’s just because the software isn’t perfect, but it’s also possible that the links that point to your site were built in a very exquisite black hat SEO way and the software just isn’t savvy enough to get the point. To the best of my knowledge, there no software that checks links with 100% accuracy. At least, it did not exist at the time of the writing.
Why Automate
That said, there may also be bad reasons not to do an automatic backlink checkup. You or your boss may just not be ready to shell out that much. Yeah, that’s right. Chances are, we talk about something that costs around $50, but for some site owners it’s beyond their budget because they just don’t have one for improving their site’s online standing. You don’t wanna dwell too mauch on what you personally think about that sort of site owners, but one thing remains true: such things happen and you need to learn to live with them or get a better job.
Closer Look
While doing your manual link checkup, you’ll have a perfect chances to see the dynamics of your link growth from a closer distance. That allows to see where you went wrong and what you need to stay away from in the future in terms of the sites and services you use for link building. On the flip side, you’ll see new opportunities for promoting your site online by checking sites that have high-quality links pointing back to your own site.
Before you go any further with checking your link profile, you must keep in mind that you better stay away from hidden, blogroll and footer links. That especially holds true if you have a huge amount of such links. That sort of links are a sure fire way to cause a disaster for your site.
If you use your Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) link list, you’ll most likely stumble upon links that don’t really exist any more, but are still in the file. That’s ok. Such things just happen. Thing is GWT link list is not the most up-to-date, but it’s the most in-depth one. In case you need more updated data, you can consider using Screaming Frog for the purpose.
Disavow ‘em all
In case you find a track of links from low-quality pages that keep on appearing from time to time, you may want to disavow such domains so that you’re safe in the future even if they show up from the same domain down the road. In strict accordance to Google’s guidelines, you’re supposed to firstly contact those domains’ site owners by all possible means – such as email, contact form, Facebook, Twitter, etc – and if none of the methods work, then it’s high time to apply your Disavow file.
Link Age
You may want to know an interesting peculiarity about how GWT work in terms of assigning age to your backlinks. Thing is, it shows you the date when your link was indexed. And it can be far from the date when that site where it points from actually went live. Don’t get surprised if your list contains a list of sites that were up for at least half a year but the links were just noticed a few weeks ago or so. In fact, it makes perfect sense because some links come from low homepage PR sites. Since their PR is low, they are not crawled that often and can remain unseen for months or even years.
Bottom line
The skill of manual link profile checkup is a very valuable one because it allows you to make sure that your software works as you expect it to. Sure thing, you’re not supposed to re-check all your links but a few samples will allow you get a general idea about the quality of your automatic reports. Other than that, it allows for making sure that the work that was outsources was properly handled.
