Runbook
A href backlinks checker for sellers: audit what your pages link out to
Buyers audit you before they order. Do it first. A forty-minute pass over your own outbound links tells you what a buyer, or an algorithm, would see.
The audit in order
- Crawl the site with Screaming Frog or any crawler that exports outlinks.
- Filter to external
a hreftargets and sort by domain. - Mark every link you were paid for, and every link that looks like it.
- Check each marked link for
relvalues:sponsored,nofollow,ugcor none. - Look for domains that appear more than three times.
- Open ten random outlinks and confirm the target still matches the topic.
A quick pass from the command line
If you keep a local copy of your pages, this lists external links with their rel attribute. It is a sketch, not a full parser, so spot-check the output.
grep -rhoE '<a [^>]*href="https?://[^"]+"[^>]*>' ./export \
| sed -E 's/.*href="([^"]+)".*(rel="[^"]*")?.*/\1 \2/' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -40What the numbers should tell you
Count, then sort. A page with one outbound link to a university and one to a tool vendor is ordinary.
A page with seven outbound links, five of them commercial and three pointing at the same domain, is the shape of a paid article, and Google's link spam systems are built to notice that shape. The December 2022 update and the March 2024 policy rewrite both talked about links that exist for ranking rather than for readers.
You are not hunting for guilt. You are hunting for patterns you could not explain in one sentence to a sceptical editor, which is a better test than any score from Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz.
A rel attribute cheat sheet
| Attribute | Meaning | Typical use on a seller's site |
|---|---|---|
| none | Ordinary editorial link | Sources you chose yourself |
| nofollow | Do not pass credit by default | Links you do not want to vouch for |
| sponsored | Paid or compensated link | What Google asks for on paid placements |
| ugc | User-generated content | Comments and forum posts |
Placements sold here are permanent dofollow. Whether a given link should also carry a sponsored label is your call as the site owner, and Google's guidance on paid links applies to you. Decide before you list, not after the first sale.
What to fix first
Start small. Fix the worst page before the whole site, and do not try to clean two hundred articles in one sitting, because fatigue makes you either ruthless or lazy.
Remove or relabel links you cannot defend, replace dead outlinks and merge duplicate articles that point at the same commercial target. Then re-crawl and compare counts.
Keep the before-and-after exports in a folder with the date, so the next audit has a baseline. When you are ready to open a slot, return to the first sale walkthrough and the pricing method.
Run it again after every ten sales
Audits decay. Ten sold placements later, your outbound profile has changed.
Put the crawl in the calendar for the first of each month, compare the outlink count against the previous export, and note any domain that gained a new link. A sudden jump from 140 to 260 external links in a month is a signal worth an hour of your time.
If you sell through the marketplace, the order list gives you the target of each placement, so the check reduces to matching your crawl against your own records.