How to control the growth of the link popularity of the website

When used correctly, the link popularity helps the website to improve its SERP position in search results. Also, the publication of links to your resource makes it possible to obtain a certain degree of trust from the search engines.

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.
  

The required condition for external promotion is a balance. This means that links are not published on the principle of "more is better", a solid strategy of external promotion is being developed, which will ensure the growth of positions for key queries and prevent the imposition of sanctions by search engines.

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.

The tool is useful because it shows all the indexed links. This means that you will receive information on links which Google searches take into account.

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 section allows you to view and export data from the websites linking to your resource. In the old version of the console, the reports are in this section:

To get information on the most frequently referred websites, open the "Popular Links" report in more detail:

Here you will receive all detailed information about the crawled links. This document can be filtered or downloaded to your computer:

For a more advanced analysis, you can download the report from the tool and perform the analysis manually. Then you will need to export the data to Google Sheets and set up the chart by the ranges of the table.

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.

In order to get ready-made data, including a visual graph, go to your projects and select the "Backlink Analysis" section in the left menu.