This SOP is a work in progress. If you notice anything that is out of date, could be more clear or could be more efficient please update the SOP or add a comment to start a conversation.
Purpose
This document is to explain what backlinks are and how they affect SEO.
Procedure
What is a Backlink Scan?
A backlink is another domain or website has a hyperlink that links back to the client site. Every single link to your client’s website from another source is a backlink. Now when determining the authority of a website, Google looks at a site’s backlink profile to help decide how well or how highly to rank that website. It considers the topic of the linking domains, the authority of the linking domains, and a plethora of other factors that are used when determining how to rank a site. The more good links, the more trust Google will have in your website. If they notice too many bad links, especially those from private blog networks (PBNs) or spammy websites they don’t trust your domain as much, meaning they won’t rank your website as highly.
What does this mean?
It means we want links from relevant authoritative sites. However, just because a site may have low authority or be slightly off-topic doesn’t mean it’s a bad link. It’s up to us to determine what is a good and what is a bad backlink.
It is recommended that you only disavow backlinks if you believe they are a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing back to your site and if you are confident that they links are causing issues for you.
How does this help the SEO campaign?
By disavowing bad links, it allows us to tell Google “Hey, we know these links are linking to our website, but please don’t hold them against us.” Google will then not consider those links- good or bad- when analyzing our website’s backlink profile.
How is this done?
Using Majestic, the internet is crawled to find links to a client's domain. From there, our teams in Mexico and Belize will do an initial sweep of the list removing domains that qualify as good backlinks, since this will be a list of the bad domains we want to get rid of. This will be done every 4 months or 3 times a year for each client.
After that, you will receive a message informing you that it’s your turn to check the remaining domains on the disavow list!
When you have been notified that a backlink scan has been completed for your client, what do you do?
Navigate to the client doc
There’s now a tab labeled “Backlink scan”
Here, there are a bunch of domains listed. These domains are sites that link back to your dealer's site! “Good Links” have already been removed from this list as this is a list we will be submitting to Google to “disavow”.
Give the list of Domains a read. If you notice any that may be relevant to your dealership, check them out in an incognito window.
IF they are relevant, remove the domain from the list by deleting the row with the domain. Domains on the list will be disavowed by Google, so if it’s relevant to your website, get it off of this list.
IF they are NOT relevant, leave them on the list!
A domain should only be considered not relevant if it is spammy, artificial, or a low-quality link pointing back to your site that is causing issues for the site
Once you’ve checked the entire list, respond to the person who initially messaged you letting them know that you’ve completed your check and the list is ready to disavow!
Make sure to add to your work done for the month that you completed a backlink scan.
This month we also performed a backlink scan for your site. We looked at all of the sites that are pointing to your site and disavowed any links that could be causing harm to your site. When we disavow a link we let Google know that we do not want that link to reflect on your site in the eyes of Google. This will prevent spammy, artificial, or low-quality links from bringing the ranks of your site down or causing us to incur a penalty.
Q&A
While you want to make sure that you are taking the time to properly vet every link on the list, sometimes one can slip through that is important. While it isn't a great idea to disavow a link and then allow it back, it isn't the end of the world. There is a process in Search Console in which you can remove the list of links that you have disavowed.
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