5 Ways to improve your backlink monitoring

You already know how important backlinks are. That’s why you’ve worked so hard to secure more quality links so that you climb the SERPs.

But when it comes to backlink monitoring? Perhaps you’re not quite there yet.

Monitoring your links ensure that all the hard work you put into securing links in the first place actually means something.

In this article, Nightwatch takes a look at five ways to improve your backlink monitoring to help turn you into a backlinks Jedi.

Measure your blogger outreach efforts

Blogger outreach is a great way to secure more backlinks. It’s also probably the most popular method.

But while securing those links is one thing, optimizing them is another.

Using your Nightwatch backlink tracker, you can assess which links affect your rankings the most while making sure that each link is indexed properly.

Another neat thing you can do with your backlinks tracker is to do what our company did. We took a look at our link performance throughout three months and found that we secured 13 new links and lost three.

Armed with this information, we investigated further and looked for ways to re-secure these lost links.

Remember that your blogger outreach efforts will entirely be in vain if you don’t measure the results.

Find and report suspicious-looking backlinks

The thing about backlinks is there are good ones and bad ones.

The bad ones come from spammy websites (such as PBNs). And what truly sucks is that, if you secure a bad link (even by mistake), Google will punish you. Not cool.

Using your backlinks tool, you can easily spotify websites by filtering them out according to domain authority and page authority.

As you can see from the image above, there are a lot of links from “farm sites” that aren’t contributing anything useful for us. In fact, they’re harming them.

Once you’ve spotted bad links waste no time exporting them before importing them to Google Disavow.

Find the live status of any core backlinks

Your core backlinks are key to your success, which is why you need to know which ones are live (online) and which ones are dead (offline).

After all, it’s going to rile you if you worked hard for a link (and even paid money) only for the link to go offline.

The backlink tracker tool you use will keep an eye on the status of your links.

Nightwatch, for example, does this automatically and lets you know when a link has become inactive immediately so that you can make the necessary adjustments. This prevents the link from adversely affecting your position in the SERPs.

Measure your steady stream of backlinks

If you secure two or three backlinks in January, none in February, six in March, and one in April, your inconsistency will kill you.

What you want is a steady and even stream of incoming backlinks. This is regarding IPs, referring domains and number of backlinks.

When you split your backlinks into segments, you can more easily observe trends. When each segment follows a linear direction that’s similar to each other segment, you know that you’ve got some healthy organic SEO growth on your hands here.

Here are some segments you can create:

Outreach backlinks –  These are links secured by your blogger outreach strategy

Organic backlinks – If you create valuable content, people will link out to you of their own volition

High/Medium/Low-quality backlinks – These are links that point to your site from another website with a certain page authority and domain authority.

Measure the impact on ranking changes

To understand the effect each individual backlink is having on your rankings, you should segment.

Segmentation is what lets you measure impact better than ever. In so doing, you’ll be able to identify the types of backlinks that have the most influence over specific segments of your website.

For example, let’s imagine you run an online store that sells sports shoes. Here are some segments you could create:

• Running shoes
• Outdoor shoes
• Basketball shoes

And so on.

If you create a segment for “running shoes”, you then need to include all keywords that contain “running” in the keyword.

Then, you’ll create a backlink segment. For any backlinks that contain your main keyword in the anchor text “running shoes,” you will call “In anchor: running shoes.”

Then, you want to visualize the rank of all your keywords on your websites graph, as well as the “backlink” keyword segment. Your aim is to discover the number of backlink segments and backlinks you created, as well as the number of backlinks that match them.

As per the image above, you can see that we secured two new backlinks in mid-January that contained the anchor keyword “backlink.”

Not long after that, the average ranking segment of all our backlink-related keywords shot up.

When you adopt this approach, you can see how your average rank goes hand in hand with general backlinks. As a result, you’re able to find ways of securing the types of backlinks to your subpages that will boost your position in the SERPs.

These are 5 ways to improve your backlink monitoring using SEO performance tracker Nightwatch. Provided you continue to monitor your backlinks, they can be an awesome way to improve your ranking. Secure them, monitor them — and rinse and repeat.