Digital PR and Link Building
Link profile audit
Understand what your profile actually looks like, including the parts somebody bought years ago. Scoped as its own piece because that is how it is usually bought.
What does link profile audit mean here?
Understand what your profile actually looks like, including the parts somebody bought years ago. In practice that means full referring domain review by relevance, quality and how it was acquired, and then the harder half: identifying patterns that look manipulative whether or not they were intended.
Why this work exists
Skipping it is defensible for a quarter. Past that it starts costing more than doing it would have.
It sits inside Digital PR and Link Building, which is the broader discipline, and it is the part people most often ask for by name.
The nearest piece of work to it is answering a journalist within the hour rather than the week. Where that is already handled, this moves faster than the estimate; where it is not, the two get done together or neither of them holds.
What good looks like
The sign it is working is that nothing surprising happens. Changes are noticed on the day they are made rather than in the next quarterly review.
The gap between that and where most accounts start is why this is scoped as link profile audit rather than as a line inside something larger. Documenting what the previous agency actually did is the usual second step once it is in place.
When this is the right work
What tells you to start here:
- Historic link buying happened and nobody knows the extent
- Anchor text distribution is dominated by exact-match commercial phrases
- A previous agency’s work is undocumented
If none of those is true, something else is probably the constraint, and the Digital PR and Link Building overview maps the alternatives. The usual neighbours are qualifying for the accreditations buyers check and finding the story in the data the business already collects.
What the work covers
Four items, each with an output:
- Full referring domain review by relevance, quality and how it was acquired. This is where the theory meets the account and usually loses.
- Identifying patterns that look manipulative whether or not they were intended. This is where the theory meets the account and usually loses.
- Assessing whether any disavow is warranted, which usually it is not, scoped against what the business can actually act on rather than what is possible.
- Establishing what a healthy acquisition pattern looks like for the category. Worth doing badly rather than not at all, if time is short.
How it runs
Three stages. Most of the risk sits in the first one.
Clearing the contradictions
Where two systems disagree about the same fact, that gets settled before anything is built on top of either of them.
Setting the review rhythm
How often this gets looked at again, and by whom, is agreed now rather than left to whoever notices first.
Costing the options
Where there is more than one route, each gets a rough cost and a rough timeline, so the choice is made on trade-offs rather than on whichever was described most confidently.
What each part runs into
Each part meets a different obstacle depending on the market it is done in:
- Full referring domain review by relevance, quality and how it was acquired, harder in Abu Dhabi because of a language mix the content has to match rather than assume
- Identifying patterns that look manipulative whether or not they were intended – in Leeds, complicated by the fact that an enquiry path that runs through a messaging app rather than a form
- Assessing whether any disavow is warranted, which usually it is not, which in Dallas runs into a catchment smaller than the ambition on the website
- Establishing what a healthy acquisition pattern looks like for the category: the Melbourne version of this has to deal with an incumbent whose position comes from presence rather than effort
The trap
Disavowing aggressively on instinct. Disavow is for genuine manipulation you cannot remove, and over-use removes value that was doing no harm.
It is a cheap mistake to avoid and an expensive one to discover six months in.
How it is measured
Profile composition by source quality, and anchor text distribution. It is reported with the existing metrics rather than replacing them, because a new number nobody recognises persuades nobody.
Reported with its own caveats attached, rather than cleaned up for the deck.
What you end up with
In concrete terms the output is a documented profile assessment with risk classified and a remediation decision recorded either way.
Kept short enough that it gets read, which is the only property that matters.
How it differs by sector
By sector, the same scope produces different priorities:
- Legal and professional services: the thing that changes the scope here is that high-value, high-intent local search under advertising rules that vary by jurisdiction.
- For Real estate and property, portals own the generic demand, so the win is locality authority and the specific listing. and that shapes how far this can go.
- Nonprofit and NGO brings its own limit: two audiences with nothing in common: donors and the people served.
The industry pages carry the rest of that detail. Legal and professional services and Real estate and property are the two where this piece of work most often decides the outcome.
Common questions
Should a disavow file be used?
Rarely. It exists for cases of genuine link manipulation that cannot be removed at the source, and most link spam is simply ignored rather than counted against a site. Disavowing broadly on suspicion removes value from links that were helping, which is a self-inflicted loss.
What does an unnatural link profile look like?
Patterns that no editorial process would produce: exact-match commercial anchor text dominating the distribution, large numbers of links from unrelated low-quality sites acquired in a short window, site-wide footer links across many domains, and reciprocal link schemes. One of these alone may mean little; together they are a pattern.
What comes after this?
Whatever Profile composition by source quality, and anchor text distribution shows. The next piece is scoped from the result rather than agreed in advance, because committing to it now would be guessing.
Does this work at our size?
The diagnosis does, at any size. Whether the work that follows is worth the money depends on what an improvement in Profile composition by source quality, and anchor text distribution is actually worth to the business, which is the first thing to settle. The specifics live in Server-side rendering or Client-side rendering. Subdirectory or Subdomain is the context that makes them make sense.
Can this be scoped on its own?
Yes, where the diagnosis says it is the constraint. More often it runs inside a Digital PR and Link Building engagement, because the adjacent work is what makes the result hold. The scoping conversation settles which. Does Google penalise AI-written content? is the counterweight to Do we need a blog?, and both are worth half an hour.
Ask about link profile audit
Write what you would say on a call. The reply will be the same thing we would have said.
Take the guesswork out of the next quarter
Tell us what you sell and what is not working. We will come back with the two or three things we would look at before anything else.