Are you really worried for your website performance with next Penguin Update? If yes, then you might have used some unethical practices for your website better presence of SERP.
Also, if you just want to be secure and safe then you can check your link profiles before Google says about them. So, here is the process for your backlink diagnosis.
Open your webmaster account and extract all the websites where your websites have been linked. Webmaster is preferred as you receive a penalty message in it and Penguin guides to obey the webmaster guidelines.
There are many other paid and un-paid software (mostly paid) where you can extract the backlinks of your websites. Such as Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Moz etc. But backlink count for the same website on different tools doesn’t match. This can be another reason for using Google Webmaster Tool.
Once you have the list of all backlinks of your website start investigating the following points:
Check for total linking domains and backlinks from the linking domains. A big variation between these can be a sign of unnatural links.
Calculate the ratio of dofollow and nofollow links. Link profile should be primarily dofollow, but some nofollow links are also required.
Having too many Backlinks from another’s home page can also be a flag indicating that you may be involved in link exchange scheme or may be a paid link.
Check the Geographical location of the Domains on which you are linked. Assume your website business is in Australia but having backlinks from German websites can be the noticed.
Backlinks from the website not of the same niche as our website can also be flagged as a sign of unnatural links.
Organize you backlinks according to the quality of their domains. Having more backlinks from the low-quality website may be the biggest reason for your website penalization. Quality can be tracked with Page Rank as it’s not updated from a long time so page authority and domain authority helps you a lot.
Check for over-optimized anchor texts and other phrases of anchor text that are linking to your website.
Check weather inbound links are only linking to a single page or other pages of the website also. There should be a variety of backlinks to you inner pages.
So, this was the process of link Audit. You can perform it manually or with the help of software. In my next post, I will explain the process of Lifting the penalty and link removal.