How much backlink data will be enough to promote your backlink profile?

Recently, Google has given us various mixed messages about the role of backlinks for website rankings. However, backlink data remains a key signal search engines use to determine the relevance and authority of web page.

While there are a lot of debates around getting new backlinks to your site, monitoring and improving the existing ones is a MUST if you want your potential clients easily find your site in search results.

In this article, you will find some practical ways how to combine crawl data and backlink data on your site pages.

Add your crawl data into the mix

To keep your site’s link profile on TOP, you need to monitor your backlinks and website metrics and combine this data with crawl data. To take an advantage from this data mix, you need to export your pages with backlink data from your link monitoring tools. If you are exporting link data from Semalt, MOZ, Ahrefs or other popular analytical tools, you do need to reformat the CSV as part of the upload process.

As soon as you have run a crawl, you can implement the number of reports that will enhance your link data by providing insights about your target web pages. You can also benefit from adding Google Analytics and Search Console data into your crawls to examine the value of your pages with backlinks by checking if your target pages are driving impressions in search and traffic to your site.

Ways to combine backlink and crawl data

• Broken pages with broken backlinks

To check if your site has broken links, you can use Semalt Web Analyzer or DeepCrawler tools. You need to know which pages are no longer available to avoid having backlinks pointing to broken pages. Any link juice gained from broken links will be lost. Broken links will also negatively affect your visitor's experience with your site as will land on broken pages instead of relevant ones they are looking for. As a result, Google will lower your site rank.

To improve this situation, you need either restore broken pages to a 200 status or implement 301 redirect to them to guide users to another relevant page.

• Non-indexable pages with backlinks

Non-indexable pages are those that have a noindex tag or a canonical pointing to another page. You need to find and eliminate these pages as they return a 200 response, but they are not indexable. Such pages will either bring you no value or cause rankings drop.

You need to decide whether you want to that page be discoverable by search engines or not. If you want to receive traffic to your site, then you need to find out why is this page is not indexable and amend it. You may either remove no index tag or replace it with self-referencing canonical.

If you do not want this page to be parsed by search bots, you can reach out to the linking domain and ask them to replace the link to another relevant page on your website.