Been doing this a long time and I’ve got my own habits, but I’m curious how others approach the first week with a new client’s backlink profile. Mine looks roughly like this:
1. Export referring domains from two tools, merge, dedupe
2. Sort by first seen date to spot any bursts and ask the client what happened then
3. Anchor text breakdown, looking for money anchors over about 5-10%
4. Check top 50 linked pages, especially any 404s or redirects losing equity
5. Look for obvious paid patterns: same footer, “sponsored” categories, sites with 200 outbound links per post
6. Ask the client straight out what they or previous agencies bought
The last one usually tells me more than all the tools combined.
What am I missing? And how long do you spend on this before you start actually building anything? I’ve had clients get twitchy when week three rolls around and nothing new has gone live.
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