How to Audit Your Backlink Profile Before Q4

Every year the same thing happens. A founder notices in late November that a few important pages have slipped in search, starts digging, and finds a problem that was sitting in plain sight since summer: a handful of good links quietly disappeared, a partner site redesigned and dropped its links, or a strange batch of spammy links showed up and nobody looked.

None of that is a disaster on its own. The problem is timing. Q4 is when a lot of products make a disproportionate share of their annual revenue, and it's the worst possible moment to be learning how your backlink profile works.

So do it now. This is a deliberately small audit, sized for a founder with an afternoon, a free Google Search Console account, and a spreadsheet. If you want the exhaustive version with paid tools and toxicity scoring, our full step-by-step backlink audit walkthrough covers it. This post is the pre-season check-up.

What you're actually looking for

Before opening any tool, it helps to know the four questions this audit answers:

1. Who links to you? Which sites, and are they the kind of sites you'd want to be associated with?
2. What did you lose? Links that existed a few months ago and don't anymore.
3. How do people link to you? The anchor text pattern, and whether it looks natural.
4. Is anything actively wrong? Patterns that suggest spam, a link scheme, or a manual action.

Everything else (domain metrics, competitor gaps, outreach targets) is useful, but it's not what you need to know before the season starts. Keep the scope tight and you'll actually finish.

Step 1: Pull your link data from Search Console

Google Search Console is the right starting point for one simple reason: it shows links Google itself has found. Third-party tools are great, but they're estimating Google's view. Search Console is Google's view, even if it's only a sample.

If you haven't set it up properly yet, our founder's quick-start guide to Google Search Console walks through verification and the reports that matter.

Once you're in:

1. Open Links in the left-hand menu.
2. Look at the three external link panels: Top linked pages, Top linking sites, and Top linking text.
3. Click Export external links in the top right. You'll get two options: More sample links and Latest links. Export both.

The "Latest links" export includes a crawl date for each link, which is what makes the lost-link check in Step 3 possible.

A few honest caveats about this data:

• It's a sample, not a complete list. Google doesn't show every link it knows about.
• It doesn't tell you whether a link is followed or nofollowed.
• It can lag. A link placed last week may not appear yet.

That's fine. For a pre-season check, a large, Google-sourced sample beats a perfect list you never get around to reviewing. If you want a second opinion, Bing Webmaster Tools also has a free backlinks report, and it's worth exporting that too if you already have an account.

Step 2: Build a one-tab spreadsheet

Here's where most audits go wrong: people export five CSVs, open them all, and drown. Instead, build one sheet with one row per linking domain, not per link. A site that links to you 400 times from its footer is still one relationship.

Use these columns:

Fill in Domain, Links, Example URL and Target page straight from the exports. A pivot table on the domain column of the sample-links export gets you most of the way there in a couple of minutes.

Then go through the list and fill in Relevance by hand. For most small and mid-sized products this is a manageable list, and doing it manually is the point: you'll learn more about your profile from twenty minutes of actually looking at linking sites than from any score.

Step 3: Find the links you lost

Lost links are the most overlooked part of any audit, and before a busy season they're usually the most valuable thing to fix. A recovered link is almost always easier to get than a new one, because the site already decided once that you were worth linking to.

There are three common ways links disappear:

• The page was removed or redirected. The linking page now returns a 404 or redirects somewhere irrelevant.
• The page was edited. The page still exists, but your link has been removed or swapped for a competitor's.
• Your URL changed. You moved or renamed a page, and the link now points at a 404 on your site.

That third one is entirely within your control and surprisingly common. Before anything else, check the Top linked pages panel against your current site. If any of your top linked pages return a 404, set up a 301 redirect to the closest equivalent page today. That alone can be the highest-return fix in the entire audit.

For the first two, open the Example URL for each of your higher-relevance domains and confirm the link is still there. Mark the Status column. If you ran a similar export a few months ago, compare the two lists: domains that were present then and missing now are your lost-link candidates.

When you find a genuinely lost link from a site you care about, a short, friendly email works far better than you'd expect. Point out what changed, offer the correct URL, and keep it to a few sentences. Our guide to tracking and monitoring your backlinks has a fuller action plan for when links disappear, and how to catch it sooner next time.

Step 4: Check your anchor text balance

Open the Top linking text panel. You're looking at how other sites describe you when they link.

A healthy, natural-looking profile is usually dominated by:

• Your brand name and domain name
• Naked URLs (yoursite.com)
• Generic phrases like "here", "this tool", or "their website"
• Descriptive but loose phrases that mention your topic without matching a keyword exactly

What you don't want to see is a profile where a large share of links use the exact commercial phrase you're trying to rank for. Real people rarely link that way. When a profile leans heavily on exact-match anchors, it usually means links were placed deliberately, and that's the pattern Google's systems are built to discount.

There's no official "safe" percentage, so don't chase one. The test is simpler: if you showed your anchor list to a stranger, would it look like people naturally talking about your product, or like someone optimising for a keyword?

If it looks over-optimised, the fix is almost never removal. It's dilution: future links should use branded and natural anchors. Our anchor text strategy guide goes into the types of anchor text and how to rebalance a profile over time.

Step 5: Spot links that are irrelevant or genuinely toxic

Now go back to your Relevance column and look at everything marked Low. Most of it will fall into one of these buckets:

• Harmless noise. Scraper sites, auto-generated "site info" pages, random aggregators. Almost every site on the web collects these. Google is generally good at ignoring them. Mark them Watch and move on.
• Unrelated but real. A legitimate site in a different industry that happened to mention you. That's fine. Not every link needs to be on-topic.
• Something you did. Old paid links, a link exchange from years ago, a batch of low-quality directory submissions, a "guest post" package someone sold you. These deserve a closer look.
• Clearly manipulative patterns. Large numbers of links from sites that exist only to host links, all with the same exact-match anchor, appearing suddenly. Rare for most founders, but worth recognising.

If you're unsure how to tell a legitimate directory from a link farm, we wrote a whole piece on the difference between link farms and curated directories. The short version: real editorial review, real categories, and real visitors are good signs; pay-for-anything, no review, and thousands of unrelated outbound links per page are bad ones.

Step 6: Decide whether to disavow (usually: don't)

The disavow tool has an outsized reputation. Founders find a few spammy links, panic, and upload a long disavow file. In most cases that's unnecessary, and disavowing good links by mistake can do more harm than the spam ever would.

Google's own guidance is that most sites never need to use it. Consider disavowing only when:

• You have a manual action for unnatural links in Search Console (check the Manual actions report), or
• You know there's a significant number of links you or someone working for you created through paid links or link schemes, and you can't get them removed.

If neither applies, leave the noise alone. Random spam that you had nothing to do with is, in the vast majority of cases, simply ignored.

If you do need to disavow, keep it surgical: use domain-level entries (domain:example.com) for sites that are spam through and through, add a comment line explaining why, and keep a copy of the file alongside your spreadsheet so next quarter's audit starts from the same baseline.

Step 7: Turn the audit into a short Q4 plan

An audit that ends in a spreadsheet and nothing else was a waste of an afternoon. Sort by Verdict and turn it into three lists:

Recover (this week). Lost links from relevant sites, plus any 404s on your own top linked pages. These are the quickest wins you'll find.

Strengthen (before the season peaks). Look at your Top linked pages panel again. Are your most commercially important pages (pricing, product, key features) getting any links at all, or is everything pointing at your homepage and one old blog post? If so, point a few of your strongest internal links at the pages that sell.

Fill gaps (ongoing). If your list of genuinely relevant linking domains is short, that's the real finding, and it's normal for young products. The fix is steady acquisition of links from sites in your space: an earned mention, a relevant guest post, a listing in a curated directory that actually reviews submissions. A BacklinkLog listing is one small, predictable way to add a relevant do-follow link from a tech-focused directory while you work on the slower stuff.

How often to repeat this

You don't need to do this monthly. A rhythm that works for most small teams:

• Quarterly: this exact audit. Same spreadsheet, new exports, compare against last time.
• Monthly (10 minutes): glance at the Links report for anything unusual, like a sudden flood of new linking sites or a top linked page that has started returning errors.
• Whenever you change URLs: check your top linked pages and set up redirects before you ship, not after.

The real value comes from the second and third runs. The first audit tells you what your profile looks like. The next ones tell you which direction it's moving, and that's what lets you walk into the busiest part of the year knowing your links are working for you, not quietly leaking away.