13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

Many people forget about their existing backlinks and focus only on building new links. But if you don’t pay attention to your link churn, then all the new links will only make up for that.

Getting links is never an easy task when you have to approach someone out of the blue and persuade them to link to your site.

But what if they are already linking to you? Reaching out to someone who is already linking to you is so much easier than cold calling.

So how can you improve the links you already have?

We had a late night discussion in the LRT Associates Forum and came up with 13 ways to improve the backlinks that you already have.

Some strategies might be more obvious than others, but I’m sure you will have at least one ‘light bulb moment’ during this article.

Learn how to:

• Find mentions of your brand that can be converted into links
• Fix troublesome anchor text links
• Make people who already link to you, link again
• Keep your link profile looking natural by changing some links

…and much more!

A mention is where somebody has mentioned your brand or one of your branded products on their site but hasn’t linked to you. This could be a raw URL, like http://yourdomain.com as well as the name of your brand.

If someone mentioned your brand, then why wouldn’t they want to link to you? A simple email like this will usually do the trick:

“Hey [NAME],

I’m [YOUR NAME], [POSITION] at [WEBSITE].

I see you mentioned my [WEBSITE] on [Your Page] about [The Subject]. Thank you for doing that I really appreciate it.

However, I was wondering if you would mind adding a hyperlink so that people can find out more about [The Subject].

I think it would be super-useful for your visitors.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Thanks a lot.

All the best.

[Your Name]”

Most reports in LinkResearchTools have the column called Link Status. If LinkResearchTools finds links that have “MENTION” as link status, you will be able to filter these links and then sort them by Power*Trust. This way, you will find the best mentions that are worth changing to a link.

The example shows mentions of the bingo review site twobigladies.co.uk. I hid a few columns so that you can concentrate on the Power*Trust and the Power*Trust topdom:

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

The top result is a page from The Daily Mail website about the much-loved soap star actress Anne Kirkbride who died in April 2015. There are two mentions of the site on this page. If you are reasonably well connected with the news media it should be possible to get one of these changed to a link. At the moment the mentions are right in the middle of the article which would make a fantastic link on a popular page:

The Backlink Profiler (BLP) is a great tool for finding mentions that look like links but to find brand mentions that don’t look like URLs will take a little more digging.

LRT Power*Trust and reach out to webmasters to convert the powerful mentions into backlinks.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

Let’s say that your client is Asda Tyres who have the domain asdatyres.co.uk which is a website that sells car tyres online. Please note that the word tyres is spelt tires in the US and Canada, this is also a common misspelling in the UK. The brand is ‘Asda Tyres’ which is part of the huge British supermarket chain Asda which has the website asda.com. Asda is owned by the US giant Wal-Mart.

You can use Google and Google Alerts to find mentions, by using footprints like this:

“asda tyres” OR “asda tires” -asdatyres.co.uk -asda.com

This will find mentions of ‘asda tyres’ and its UK misspelling which are not on the asdatyres.co.uk or the asda.com websites. This gives about 18,500 results in Google, so how do you find the best mentions to change to links? We have a tool for that.

The SERP Tool allows you to do 20 Google search queries and then combine the results enriched with all the usual LinkResearchTools metrics. With a bit of thought you should be able to come up with some footprints like this:

“asda tyres” OR “asda tires” -asdatyres.co.uk -asda.com “asda” “tyres” -asdatyres.co.uk -asda.com “asda” “car tires” -asdatyres.co.uk -asda.com

Note that in the last of these three footprints I used the exact phrase “car tires”, this is to avoid picking up examples like ‘My husband tires of me indulging in special offers at Asda’.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

To find the most mentions you should select all results from any time. It’s best to use the local search engine and language that your target audience will use too. In this case, it is google.co.uk in English.

In the metrics section, you can select the metrics you wish. I would suggest that you definitely want to look at the LRT Trust and LRT Power details.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

Once the results are in, you can select the ‘Linked’ column to show the URLs that are not linked to your site. You can then look for the high LRT Power*Trust pages and consider contacting the site.

The SERP Tool might not find as many mentions as a straight Google search. However, it will find the most relevant results, so you can avoid wasting time chasing links that may be weak or irrelevant.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

There are many reasons why you might want to get the anchor text of a link changed, for example:

• Your ratios of Brand/Compound/Money/Other looks very different to your competitors on Google’s first page
• You have overdone money anchor text which could lead to Google Penguin hell!
• Your brand has changed

But how do you know what you need to change? You could begin by tackling the ones that are causing a problem.

In a Link Detox (DTOX) project you can easily filter links which are triggering certain rules that are related to anchor text.

It is highly likely that these links will also be triggering other rules too, so it would be wise to take a look at those carefully.

If you run Link Detox on your site you should look out for these rules:

SUSP28

The SUSP28 rule means that a money keyword anchor text was found in more than 5% of the backlinks in your link profile. You could try and get these links changed to ‘brand’ or ‘other’ keywords.

SUSP29

The SUSP29 rule means that the anchor text has been marked as a ‘compound keyword’ and appears in more than 5% of all backlink anchor text. You could try and get these links changed to ‘brand’ or ‘other’ keywords.

SUSP31

The SUSP31 rule means that the anchor text placement looks suspicious. It is worth taking a look at these links to see if there is a possibility of getting them changed. For example, you might have a site wide link in the footer of a website. In this case, it might be worth offering to write a guest post for the site with an editorial link and have the footer link removed.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

If you run the Competitive Landscape Analyzer (CLA) for your site and your competitors you will get an excellent understanding of your niche. You can use the ‘find competing pages’ feature of the CLA if you wish, but I like to use the Organic Competitors report from Semrush. The Semrush competition takes into account how many keywords each site ranks for compared with how many keywords it has in common with your site.

You can export the report as a CSV file and then copy the first 10 domains and paste them straight into CLA as a domain list;

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

The CLA gives lots of results about every aspect of your link profile. The histograms provide an easy way to spot where your site is not looking like the others who are doing really well in Google.

If you spot that your ratios between Brand/Compound/Money and Other keywords are looking very different to the competition you should do something about this. Most reputable websites will understand the dangers of unnatural anchor text links and will be happy to change Money anchors to Brand or Other links:

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

Sites don’t usually link to you in the footer of their website without a good reason. In the past, the footer was the most popular place for links to friend’s websites or those who you have a financial arrangement with. In the histogram below it would make a lot of sense to ask for those footer links to be moved to a link list or a contextual link in a block of text.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

Every site should have a mixture of Follow and NoFollow links. You can get a good idea of the ratio that is expected by running the Competitive Landscape Analyzer (CLA) with your site and your competitors. From the CLA report, you can look at the Link Status and see how you could adjust your Follow/NoFollow ratio to blend in with the sites that are ranking in the top positions already.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

In the above example the orange bars are you, so you can see that gaining some more Follow links and less NoFollows will help your site blend in with competition. Your aim here should be to increase the amount of Follow links from 70% to 75% and take the NoFollow link ratio below 25%.

Although you wouldn’t want to convert all your NoFollow links into Follow links, it might make sense to get a Follow link from a strong site that is linking to you for all the right reasons.

This won’t always be that easy because whoever is linking to you, may have a reason why they chose to No Follow your link. However this maybe something they have overlooked so it is always worth asking. It’s quite probable that an article was published by somebody following their standard company guidelines where they NoFollow all links.

A link from an image is fine, but an image without an Alt-Text tag is not so good for you or the site it is on. Because this a potential improvement to the website the link is on, you should have no problem getting this added. You could point the webmaster to this article if they need reassurance. Ideally, the alt text should be a text version of what the image is, which should hopefully be related to your brand or a product that you sell.

These are easy to find using Backlink Profiler or Link Detox reports. You need to filter for;

Anchor Text = [IMG no alt-text] LinkType = image

You can now sort by Power*Trust and contact webmasters to try and get a relevant keyword in the alt-text.

You can see dropped links in a Backlink Profiler (BLP) or a Link Detox (DTOX) report if you have disabled the Remove Dropped Links in the Advanced Settings:

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

My personal preference is to do this in a Link Detox report so that you can check the potential risk of those links. In many cases, I have seen large amounts of dropped links that I never want to see again.

Once you have your Link Detox report you can filter for Anchor Text = [LinkNotFound] and then look at the dropped links with a Low and Medium DTOXRISK:

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

After a site re-launch, re-structure or old pages being deleted, it is highly likely that you will have inbound links to pages that no longer exist. We have a tool to find these pages, the Link Juice Recovery tool (LJR). Once you find these pages you can recover the link juice in one of these ways:

1. Get the existing link changed
2. Re-create the page
3. Redirect to an appropriate existing page

Option 1 is the most preferable, but not the easiest to do. However, most webmasters would not object to being told about a broken link on their site and if an alternative was offered that would make their life easier.

Option2 is certainly something that is worth doing, if appropriate. It’s common practice for black hat SEOs to do this when they are building PBNs with expired domains, often they will just take the content from Archive.org and re-use it!

Option 3 is the easiest solution. You can implement redirects via the CMS or the .htaccess file. The 301 redirect used to be state of the art for passing link juice, but we found out that there are better alternatives today. You can read more about redirects here and pick your favorite.

Let’s try it with asdatyres.co.uk. Most large corporate websites are careful not to delete pages that might have links already. With asdatyres.co.uk I only found one and that wasn’t their fault. Normally it is possible to find quite a few links like this, especially with sites that regularly change their content.

Running the tools is easy, just enter your domain and start the report. When you get the results you have a list of URLs that no longer exist. If you want to find out more you can click the plus (+) sign next to the URL and see the links that are linking there:

In this case, the link had been garbled by whoever posted it in a forum about disability:

This is a page on a forum about useful resources for the disabled. I’m sure that this link could be fixed either by contacting the owner of the forum, or joining the forum and pointing out the error. If all else fails you could set up a redirect to take care of this.

I was slightly disappointed by only finding one non-existent page with links on asdatyres.com so I ran the LJR on asda.com. I found 48 non-existent pages which had a total of 527 backlinks going to waste. The juice from these links could easily be recovered with very little effort.

I covered this topic in my post about How to Perform a Disavow File Audit. It is for people who have submitted a disavow file to the Google Disavow Links tool in the past. This works because the web changes all the time and SEOs can make mistakes. Here are some scenarios where you can find the hidden gems:

• Previous SEOs have disavowed too many links.
• You had a link from a site with a Google Penalty, but the penalty has now gone.
• You had a link from a site that was listed as dangerous with possible malware or virus, but now the webmaster has cleaned it up.
• Your link was on a site that had no external links and looked dodgy, but now it has great links and great authority.
• The site had lots of spammy backlinks, which are now cleaned up.
• The site had a massive number of outgoing links, but it now has a new owner who has got it under control.
• The site was part of a link network but has now been purchased by a new owner who has cleaned it up.

You can read more about the Disavow File Audit mode here.

This technique is all about finding redirect chains that eventually link to your site but have lost much of their power on the way. By reducing the number of redirects you can recover a lot of link juice. Dan Shure from evolvingseo.com wrote an excellent article about this in 2013 called Stop Pulling My (Redirect) Chain which you should definitely read. This has an in-depth tutorial with 5 different methods of unpicking redirect chains.

Whilst looking at many reports as I created this article I kept noticing that there seem to be many links to asda.co.uk which now redirect to asda.com. I dug around in Archive.org to find out when this happened and it looks like it was in June 2013:

This might be a good example of where some link power and trust got lost in a redirection. To analyze this further I ran a Backlink Profiler (BLP) report on asda.co.uk. In the Metrics section I made sure that I enabled the Domain Registration metrics, because I wanted to check if their own domains were involved in a redirect chain:

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

In the BLP results, I filtered in the REG (Domain Name Registrant) column for “ASDA” which gave the following domains:

• http://asdagood4u.co.uk/
• http://asdagoodforu.co.uk/
• http://asdawondermums.co.uk/
• http://www.asdagood4u.co.uk/

These all redirect to the home page of asda.com but would be better redirecting to the appropriate pages of asda.com.

When you have decided where to redirect these domains, you can also look at the backlinks to these domains also.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

Clicking the plus (+) sign next to the URL opens up the extra dashboard from where you can launch a Quick Backlink Checker (QBL) or Backlink Profiler (BLP) report for that domain.

You could then tell the webmasters that they are linking to a redirect, but now you have a superior page that they could link to instead.

It’s important to have in mind that whenever you do a redirect, you must point the target link to the most relevant source. This way, the users will be happy to still find a relevant page related to the information they were looking for in the first place. Furthermore, even for SEO purposes, it’s always better to redirect links to an in-depth page, rather than the homepage of a website.

A great tool I always use to quickly check redirects and detect all sorts of on-page and off-page issues is the free Link Redirect Trace browser extension.

The idea of tiered linking with linking pyramids and link wheels was a standard SEO method until 2012. The concept is simple; if you already have a good link, then that link could be made stronger by building links to the link source.

This strategy was wide open before Google Penguin arrived in 2012. It was often automated with software like SENukeX which would build networks for you on autopilot.

Tier 1 was usually Web2.0 sites like MySpace, Tumblr, Blogger and Weebly as well as tons of free article directories. With reasonably well-written content these would be sufficient.

Tier 2 were usually links in places where no human would ever check anything, forum profiles, random wikis, web 2.0 profiles.

Tier 3 was where all the hardcore spam happened, mass bookmarking with Pligg sites, comment spam etc. The only real goal here was to get the Tier 2 pages indexed.

On the whole, since 2012, this black hat tiered linking has not worked. This kind of linking is a quick way to get your site penalized. Having said that, I do have a friend who is doing very well in the ‘marijuana equipment’ and ‘sex toys’ niches in a non-English language, by using this strategy. Once again, you need to know your niche and the risks involved.

Today it would make more sense to stick to authority websites that are closely related to your niche.

The problem we have these days is that good links are hard to come by, so if you can persuade someone to link somewhere, it may as well be directly to you. However in some circumstances it may be easier to get somebody to link to your link source rather than you, if that site is more on topic.

Let’s suppose that asdatyres.co.uk, which is about buying car tyres online, was lucky enough to get a link from tyresafe.org on a page talking about winter tyres. Now imagine that you had the opportunity to do a guest post on an authority blog about cycling, such as londoncyclist.co.uk. In this case, it would make sense to link to a page about driving in winter on tyresafe.org rather than your own site that sells car tyres. Similarly, if you happened to get a link from the Top Gear TV show site, it would be easier to get TV based sites like FreeSat.co.uk and TVGuide.co.uk to link to TopGear.com rather than your site.

The reality is that sites like TopGear.com and TyreSafe.org have amazing authority already so your extra efforts may be negligible. I am sure that done properly, tiered linking can help your site, although I do not believe this is the best use of your time.

If you have access to the site where you have a link, you could boost the power and relevance of that link by improving the content quality. You need to treat this post like it was on your own site; great content, great meta description, original images etc. If you can improve the relevance by tweaking the co-occurrence with some semantic keywords then do so.

SEO’s are obsessed in gaining links to their website, but sometimes it can hurt their rankings if the link source is risky. If you were to get links to your company profile in any of the social networks, it could increase the audience with no risk at all to your main site. This is a more abstract approach that does not really involve SEO, but focuses more on the community engagement.

I have an excellent example of this. I have a site which involves camping in all areas of the UK and Europe. One of the strongest links is from a site that is all about walking in Scotland. The link went to my homepage, from where they would have to find the relevant section about Scotland. I asked the site owner to change the link to my page about Scotland and almost immediately my conversion rate on that page more than doubled.

Most businesses tend to own at least a few domain names as well as their main one. They also have LinkedIn pages, YouTube Channels, Tumblr blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages etc. If people are already linking to one of your other sites, the chances are that they would be happy to link to one of your sites that they perhaps don’t know yet. If we can find these people we can ask them for a link to our site. This way you are getting them to link to you again.

The Missing Links Tool (MLT) is perfect for this strategy. You would normally use this to find the links that your competitors have that you don’t have. This time instead of comparing our domain with your competitors you can compare your domain with your other domains and social profiles:

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

In the advanced settings you should also set the commonality = 1. This means that if a link is found on only one site, it will be included in the report. Even if someone is only linking to one of your sites, you need to know about it:

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

The MLT report has two pre-made Filter Slices, ‘Good Links’ and ‘Bad Links’. The results are displayed in a grid where you can click on any of the points to launch a QBL report.

13 Ways to Improve Backlinks That You Already Have

The QBL report will show the relationship between the domain that you entered vs. your other domains or social profiles. In the example above, you can see that lovemoney.com already has links to one other domain. These were actually links on multiple pages which were all about saving money. Specific topics covered included saving money on food and school uniforms, paying less tax and finding Halloween party bargains. Surely this would be an ideal site for an article on how to save money when buying car tyres?

Link building (and link editing) involves contacting webmasters and businesses. If the link is going to be really important to you I would suggest doing this manually by email or phone. If you have a large list to work through, then you might like to automate this. If you do this your email must look as natural as possible.

The World Wide Web is continuously changing. People link, redirect, delete, sell, buy and modify their domains and pages all the time. Your links are the most powerful external asset your site has in terms of how well it ranks. You should look after your links and keep your link profile looking natural and healthy. I hope that my ideas have given you some food for thought about your existing links.

If you would like to get involved in brainstorming sessions with other LRT Associates, LRT Certified Professionals and Xperts, take the first step today with the training offered by the LRT Academy.