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Link Audits

The team at Marie Haynes Consulting has many years of experience when it comes to evaluating link quality and using Google’s disavow tool. We spend several hours manually auditing individual links to help improve your site quality.

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Pricing

Starting at $2500 USD*

What's included?

Quoting for link audits can be tricky. We won’t know how many links we have to manually assess until we have spent time gathering links from several different sources and that can take a lot of time to determine.

In most cases, we will make an estimate of the amount of work each project has based on the total number of linking domains reported on Ahrefs.com, knowing full well that the final number of links for us to assess will likely be 2-3x what is reported there.

The price listed includes all communication, link auditing, and, should you want it, we will create and file your disavow file for you.

Prices based on the number of linking domains reported on Ahrefs.com:

  • Up to 300 domains: $2500
  • 301-500 domains: $3500
  • 501-700 domains: $4500
  • 701-900 domains: $5500
  • 900+ domains: You’ll need to contact us for a quote.
*Price is based on number of linking domains

Link overview plan: $1250

If you are hesitant about having a full link audit performed, you can have the team at MHC spend a few hours reviewing some of your links and giving our thoughts on whether links are potentially hurting your ability to rank well on Google. If our analysis determines that a link audit does have the potential to help, we’ll give you a $500 credit to use towards your full link audit.

Why MHC?

Marie’s book on removing unnatural links penalties has been used by hundreds of SEOs who wanted to learn how to audit links and remove manual actions.

The MHC staff all work out of the same office in Ottawa, Ontario and are equally obsessed with helping businesses improve their online presence.

“Everything we knew about content creation and “link attraction” multiplied exponentially after receiving the first link audit report by the Marie Haynes team. The knowledge they shared with us has helped us develop healthily ever since, because we now feel able to assess the links we receive very confidently. We are grateful too for the tremendous boost that we just got in our rankings after the latest core algorithm change and this is partly due to the disavow that Andrew helped us put together. Simultaneously, we had spent nearly two years improving our content, usability and relevance following the guidance of MHC’s E-A-T insights, which elicited the very best in us. The positive results are a great motivator to keep being truthful and relevant, creating valuable content for the audience we are here to serve. Thank you so much for being our gurus in this journey!

Again, thank YOU and thanks to the whole team – keep being the best, please!”

— Daniel, For the Agless

How it works

Our link audits are as thorough as possible. We do not rely on automated link auditing software. For most links pointing to the site, the team will manually click on each linking domain and make an assessment as to whether or not Google is likely to consider it unnatural. This decision is based on our past experience, Google’s documentation, statements from Google employees, etc.

We gather links from several sources including:

  • Ahrefs
  • Majestic
  • Open Site Explorer
  • Google Search Console Most recent
  • Google Search Console Sample

Our goal is to find as many of the links as we can that Google will be likely to consider ones that were made that are listed in their documentation on link schemes.


FAQs

If you have been actively creating links for the main purpose of improving rankings, then there is a possibility that filing a disavow will help. If you are not sure, you can use our booking form to request a link overview to have the MHC staff give our opinion on whether links are likely to cause an issue for your site.

We can’t guarantee that your rankings will increase after filing a disavow. However, in many cases, especially if there is a history of having a lot of links made just for SEO, we do see nice improvements.

In most cases, if we are going to see an improvement, it starts to happen with a few weeks to a couple of months of filing a thorough disavow.

Our disavow decisions are based on many years of experience in removing Google manual penalties. In those cases, Google will send examples of the types of links which they consider unnatural. Over the years, we have seen hundreds of these examples. We also are stalking Googlers on a regular basis to learn any tips on what they may or may not consider unnatural. If a Google employee comments on link quality, we take note of it! Also, many of our recommendations are based on Google’s documentation on link schemes.

A good disavow file is quite unlikely to harm your rankings. However, if you disavow links that truly are good links, you could see drops. We are proud to say that it is extremely rare to see a drop in rankings after having the MHC team file a disavow. We are really good at determining which links are good ones, and not disavowing those links.

You will be assigned a team member who will coordinate communication and put together your report. The team member, under the close guidance of Marie, will lead the review in which the entire team here at the MHC office, just outside of Ottawa, Canada, will audit your links.

Here are the approximate lead times for each service. We do generally have a wait list, so the below times are based on time-to-completion from the start date. In some cases, if we encounter more significant issues, a project may take longer than planned. 

  • Site Quality Assessment – 3-4 weeks
  • Traffic Drop Assessment – 1-2 weeks
  • Link Overview – 1-2 weeks
  • Light Review – 1 week
  • Link Audit – Depending on the size of link profile
  • Technical SEO Consulting – Project dependent

No! Several years ago, we set out to create an algorithm to determine which links to disavow. We found that it could not be done with good accuracy. Our tool was 90-95% correct in making good disavow decisions. While that sounds pretty good, this means that in a link profile of 1000 linking domains, we’d be making wrong decisions on as many as 100 of those. That’s not acceptable to us!

We do run your links across our disavow blacklist (which contains domains which we would always disavow.) However, these days, the links that are ones that could potentially hurt are ones that we feel must be manually assessed.

Once we deliver our spreadsheet with disavow recommendations to you, we’ll communicate back and forth to answer any questions you may have. If you would like us to create and file your new disavow, we’ll do that as well.

This report does not include additional consulting outside of link quality issues. If your site has seen ranking drops in conjunction with a Google update, a better option for you may be to have our team do a site quality review. This review also contains an overview of your link quality along with our thoughts on whether further disavow work is likely to help.

Everything we knew about content creation and “link attraction” multiplied exponentially after receiving the first link audit report by the Marie Haynes team. The knowledge they shared with us has helped us develop healthily ever since, because we now feel able to assess the links we receive very confidently. We are grateful too for the tremendous boost that we just got in our rankings after the latest core algorithm change and this is partly due to the disavow that Andrew helped us put together. Simultaneously, we had spent nearly two years improving our content, usability and relevance following the guidance of MHC’s E-A-T insights, which elicited the very best in us. The positive results are a great motivator to keep being truthful and relevant, creating valuable content for the audience we are here to serve. Thank you so much for being our gurus in this journey!
Again, thank YOU and thanks to the whole team – keep being the best, please!

— Kris Gunnars, searchfacts.com

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