Your backlink profile plays a HUGE role in ranking on Google:
Get this right and you can easily get more traffic.
Get it wrong – and you could land a Google penalty or hurt your rankings.
So today you’ll discover what is a backlink profile, why a backlink profile is important and how to ethically steal your competitor’s backlink profile to rank higher.
If you want to master offpage SEO, then you need to know what I’m about to show you.
What exactly is a backlink profile?
First things first, what the heck is this?
This is just a list of websites linking to you already.
You get 2 types:
1: Page by page
2: Your whole site backlink profile
Here’s Why A Backlink Profile Is Important
The better this is, the more likely you are to rank higher on Google.
Your backlink profile can make or break your SEO strategy.
Why?
Because this is a footprint of your website’s credibility.
So it’s absolutely crucial to regularly audit your site’s backlink profile:
Schedule this task in every month.
(And I’ll show you how to do an audit in a minute.)
But here’s why it’s so important:
Understanding your backlink profile helps you identify exactly which pages need:
More and better links.
So you’ll easily be able to see:
- Which pages are the strongest
- Which ones need more links to them
And build a strategic, detailed plan – helping you rank higher.
How should you do a backlink profile analysis?
You have hire a private detective – preferably one with experience in the MI5.
Just kidding of course:
MI5 agents aren’t very good at SEO.
You can automate this for free with Google Search Console.
Just visit the links section > Then go to top linking sites.
And voila.
Your backlink profile is right there.
After that, check which sites are already linking to you.
Here’s 5 things you should be checking:
- Are the backlinks you’re getting editorially added, natural and authoritative?
- What’s the average domain rating of the backlinks?
- Are your links pointing to the right pages?
- How many backlinks are you getting each month?
- Is there a correlation between your organic traffic and the links in your backlink profile?
If you want to learn more checking your backlinks, I have a full video on the best free backlink checkers.
Now let’s talk about how to ethically steal your competitor’s backlinks.
And I will warn you now, it’s a little bit cheeky…
How To Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Backlink Profile:
This is definitely a bit sneaky.
But the beauty of SEO tools now is that you can easily see where your competitors are getting backlinks from.
So you can skip ALL the monotonous of painstaking outreach and research.
And skip to the fun stuff.
This takes just 2 minutes:
Simple open Ahrefs.com > Go to site explorer > Click the backlink section.
Now, it’s time to take those backlinks:
You can approach the same websites. ask them for a backlink and chances are they’ll link to you.
Sure, there might be a back hander of $20 or $50 to be made here or there.
But if they’ve linked to your competitors:
They’ll probably link to you.
In fact, if your competitors are buying links then it’s game on:
Because you can easily see exactly where they’re buying links from, by checking their backlink profile.
And that’s not even the best bit:
You see, now you can easily discover exactly how many backlinks you need to rank.
This is what I call a “Backlink Gameplan”:
- You can check the keywords you want to rank for
- See how many links each of your competitors have links from
- Then build links to those pages too
How?
Just use the keyword explorer in Ahrefs.
By analysing competing backlink profiles for the pages you want to rank for, you can see how many links you need to rank too.
Google gives you the data of what’s ranking already:
So it’s extremely easy to see how you can beat them.
Now what’s the best backlink profile strategy to outrank your competitors?
Let me tell you about the 20% rule:
Just build 20% more backlinks – and aim for 20% higher quality links.
By breaking this down, you have an actual formula for ranking.
Plus most of your competitors won’t understand this:
It’s a competitive advantage for you.
I’ll send you the consulting bill in the post.
Next up…
Negative backlink profiles:
Depending on your industry, some competitors will send low quality backlinks to your site:
To hurt your rankings.
It’s not nice but sadly negative SEO is a real thing.
And it can potentially decimate your site’s rankings.
Here’s an example:
If your backlink profile is full of toxic links, Google crawls that.
And it’ll see that the only websites linking to you are low quality too.
So you’re basically “guilty by association”.
If you have low quality links pointing to your site, then Google may think either:
- You’re trying to manipulate your rankings with spammy link building methods
- Your site is genuinely low quality because only spammy sites are linking to you
Either way it’s not good…
So this is why you should check your backlink profile often:
And then just disavow the links that are hurting your rankings.
Finally, let’s talk we need to talk about anchor text.
What Is The Best Anchor Text Ratio?
Anchor text impacts your rankings, so you want to keep this natural.
How?
Easiest way is to analyse the top 3 competitors for your keyword:
Then break down in % terms what types of anchor text their backlinks are using.
And just emulate that.
This could be a combination of exact match, branded, naked URLs etc.
Either way, just copy what’s already working on the first page of Google.
That’s It
That’s what you need to know about backlink profiles:
By the way, if you want your backlink profile audited for FREE:
And then have a team of SEO experts break it down for you step by step…
Then book in a call at JulianGoldie.com and it’d be an honour to help you.
