TL;DR
Most backlink audits I am shown are a sorted list with a toxicity score and a recommendation to disavow everything above a threshold. That is a tool’s opinion, reformatted. Throw the score away. In one market a site with 3,575 referring domains lost to one with 1,853.
Most backlink audits I am shown are a sorted list with a toxicity score attached, and the recommendation is to disavow everything above a threshold. That is not an audit. It is a tool’s opinion, reformatted.
Here is what I actually do with a profile, and it starts by throwing away the score.
The number at the top means less than you think
Referring domain count is the metric every tool leads with, and it is the weakest thing in the report.
I audited a fitness certification provider with 3,575 referring domains being comprehensively beaten by a competitor with 1,853: twice the traffic, more than twice the top-three rankings, off half the profile. Fewer links beat more links, and the count told you nothing about why.
There is published work pointing the same way. Ahrefs ran a correlation study across 44,589 non-branded keywords and found the sum of organic traffic to referring pages correlated with rankings better than the number of referring pages did. Their caveats apply and so do mine. It is a rank correlation on a keyword sample, not proof about your site. But the shape matches: the number at the top of the report is the least informative thing in it.
The four questions I ask instead
- 1. Would you name any of these on a sales call? Go through the top fifty by whatever authority metric you have and ask it honestly. On most profiles the answer thins out fast, and the point at which it thins is your real profile size.
- 2. Where did they come from? Editorial, directory, scraped, forum, or paid. You usually know. The composition matters far more than the count and no tool can classify it reliably.
- 3. What is the anchor text distribution? Mostly branded and URL anchors is normal and healthy. A concentration of exact-match commercial anchors is either a campaign someone ran or somebody else pointing them at you.
- 4. Is anything still live that you would rather was not? Old paid placements, a guest post network, a directory subscription nobody cancelled. These are decisions, not accidents, and they need a decision to undo.
What the profile is competing against
Worth establishing before anyone sets a target.
On a classic car marketplace I audited, the client had 671 referring domains and the category leader had 29,812. That gap is not closed by a link building campaign. It is not closed by three years of link building campaigns. The honest finding was that links were not the constraint worth working on, because the constraint was unbridgeable and something else was fixable.
It also compounds. Ahrefs studied 200,000 pages across 10,000 keywords and found pages already ranking first gaining new referring domains at 5–14.5% per month, with the pace falling as position drops. The leader is not just ahead. It is accelerating from a position you are trying to reach.
What I almost never recommend
Disavowing on a toxicity score. The scores are third-party inventions. Google is generally good at ignoring junk links, and a disavow file built from a tool’s threshold is a way to remove links that were doing something.
Setting a referring domain target. It produces exactly the profile you do not want, because the cheapest way to hit a number is the worst way to build a profile.
Auditing links before the site is worth linking to. If the pages are thin and the architecture is broken, the link profile is not the binding constraint and fixing it changes nothing.
When it is worth doing properly
Three situations. You have inherited a site with an unknown history. You suspect a previous agency bought links. Or you are genuinely competitive on everything else and want to know whether the gap is real.
Outside those, a backlink audit is usually a way to look busy on the part of SEO that is hardest to influence.
The short version
- Throw away the toxicity score. It is a tool’s opinion, not a finding.
- 3,575 referring domains lost to 1,853. Count is the weakest metric in the report.
- Ask: would you name it on a sales call? That is your real profile size.
- Composition and anchor distribution beat any aggregate number.
- Establish the gap before setting a target. 671 against 29,812 is not a campaign.
- Leaders accrue links faster: 5–14.5% a month at position one.
- Do not disavow on a score, and do not audit links before the site deserves them.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Link building covers the off-site half. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
