How to control the growth of the link popularity of the website
In order not to go beyond the link promotion strategy and to control its effectiveness, it is necessary to analyze the changes taking place with the link popularity. Such an analysis is necessary to:
- check if the published links are indexed;
- check if there are any third-party links which publication you did not initiate;
- to adjust the strategy of external promotion, the volume of publications;
- identify and eliminate the errors.
Irrelevant links, which are bought thousands per month, can harm your website and drive it under the filters. But if you buy not many links - hundreds, - they will not give you any effect.
The sharp changes in the dynamics of the link popularity attract the attention of search algorithms that are automatically punished for this. Similar actions are regarded by search engines as an attempt to manipulate search results. Swings from zero to several thousand links per month are considered sharp.
Analysis of link growth will allow:
- to find new websites which can be later used for link building;
- explore the quality of published links and the naturalness of dynamics;
- control the growth rate of the link popularity.
To learn how to check number of backlinks in a website, you can use the tools:
- Google Search Console;
- Serpstat.
Analysis of link popularity in the Google Search Console
To get a detailed dynamics report, go to the tool, then select the "Links" section in the left menu, as in the screenshot below:




This will require basic skills for working with Excel and charting. There is nothing complicated in it, and everyone will be able to perform such an analysis, the only drawback is that you will have to constantly download the information on the links from the console manually, sort it and display it in a full report by yourself. You will need to combine several different uploads in one report in order to, for example, analyze the anchor text list.
Since time is money, you can turn to Serpstat for a more advanced and automated analysis of link changes.
Link popularity analysis in Serpstat

- List of the link donors.
- The total number of backlinks.
- The total number of unique IP addresses.
- Data on the number of domains which the studied page refers to.
- The total number of pages links to which are placed on the page.
- Data on the amount of pages that are related to internal links.
- Unique IP addresses that link to your page.
- Information about the subnets in which the specified IP addresses are located.
- Summary about the number of "edu" and "gov" domains. Domains with this ending have more weight among others, since search robots have a positive attitude, trust. This observation is quite common among SEO-specialists, and there are reasons to take it into account.

Below the summary is a chart that will help you quickly navigate the dynamics of changes in the link popularity:

When analyzing link popularity changes, note that the default period is 120 days. If you need wider coverage, then adjust the schedule on the "History" tab. It is available to users of Plan C tariff and higher.
A summary report will allow you to see the big picture. This makes it possible to identify periods of growth backlinks and periods of loss. For example, if you see the loss of links in a short period of time, this may indicate that:
Of course, if the links are extended, some of them will be restored automatically, but only if there is free space on the donor's website.
To get away from filters is to abandon few trust and non-thematic links. Filters leave their mark on the further SEO-promotion of the website, its history, so be careful with links.
When analyzing links to your website, you should definitely pay attention to anchors.

Explore in more detail what percentage of the total mass relates to anchor links ("buy a bicycle"), and which does not ("on the website", "here", "Bicycle 01 company", etc.). The balance most used by SEO-specialists refers to the Pareto rule – 80/20. But in view of the individual construction of a website promotion strategy, experienced specialists using another ratio.
Detailed summaries of donor's data, linking pages, link anchors and leader pages should be found in the corresponding sections of the menu. This will allow you to get not a superficial understanding of the situation with external promotion, but to make a deep analysis of your website.
Conclusion
Large volumes of non-thematic links with a low indicator of trust negatively affect on SEO-promotion. In addition, there is a risk of getting sanctions that can seriously limit the visibility of the website or part of its pages in search results.
You can use the Google Search Console and Serpstat tools to analyze links.
Youshould also keep in mind, that competitors may purchase links to you from substandard resources. This needs to be tracked, monitored and timely informed to search engines.
This article is a part of Serpstat's Checklist tool

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