How do I audit my website's backlinks and outbound links?

The problem

Dead and suspicious backlinks hurt SEO rankings. Search engines evaluate the quality of sites linking to you, and links from parked, expired, or compromised domains actively drag your authority down. Outbound links to bad destinations hurt your site's association score, telling search engines your content connects to untrustworthy sources.

Manually checking hundreds of backlinks is tedious and error-prone. By the time you've finished auditing your link profile, new links have appeared and old ones have changed. Without automation, link audits are always out of date.

How Unphurl solves it

Export your backlinks from your SEO tool and run them through Unphurl in batch. The SEO audit scoring profile weights signals that directly affect search rankings: dead links, domain health, redirect behaviour, and security posture. You get a prioritised list of links to disavow, fix, or monitor.

Signals that matter for this use case

• – Chain incomplete means the linking domain doesn't resolve. Dead backlink, needs disavow or removal.
• – Parked means the linking domain is a placeholder. No editorial value, likely spam.
• – Domain status bad (pendingDelete, serverHold) confirms the domain is effectively dead.
• – Expiring soon flags domains about to lapse. The backlink may disappear or the domain may become spam.
• – Redirects 5+ indicates excessive redirect chains, which dilute link equity.
• – HTTP only signals a site that hasn't maintained basic security. Lower-quality backlink source.
• – SSL invalid means the site's certificate is broken. Another sign of neglect or compromise.

Suggested scoring profile

{
  "name": "seo-audit",
  "weights": {
    "chain_incomplete": 25,
    "parked": 30,
    "domain_status_bad": 25,
    "expiring_soon": 20,
    "redirects_5": 20,
    "http_only": 15,
    "ssl_invalid": 10
  }
}

What a result looks like

You export 2,000 backlinks from your SEO tool and run them through Unphurl:

You now have a prioritised disavow list. Dead and parked backlinks go straight to disavow. Expiring domains go on a watch list. The 1,800 clean backlinks are confirmed healthy, so you can focus your time on the 200 that need attention.

Cost

Most backlinks point to established, well-known sites that resolve from cache at no cost. A 2,000-link audit might use 100 to 300 pipeline checks, depending on how many linking domains are obscure or new. The Standard package covers this comfortably, and repeat audits cost even less as domains get cached.

Get started

# Audit a backlink
curl -X POST https://api.unphurl.com/v1/analyse \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://linking-site.com/page-with-backlink",
    "profile": "seo-audit"
  }'