How often should you do a link audit and disavow?

[GoAbroadKP]

Howdy Moz Fans! (Said as I twirl my non-existent mustache... damn you Rand and your cool 'stache"..!!)

So I am wondering, how often should one go through and do a link audit? The last time that I really went through a link audit was 8-12 months ago (actually, looking at my disavow upload it was Jan 2015). Is it time that I do another full scale audit of my backlinks?

[MoosaHemani]

I think there is no right way of going about it. If you really think that you have been attacked by people who are building shady links back to your profile, you defiantly should update your disavow link more frequently to tell Google that these following links are not built by you and you don’t want these links to pass a link juice to your website.

If you have built some kind of links that you later realize are shady, then you should immediately update the link disavow file accordingly.

But you are building links as per the given guidelines, you see no abnormal behavior on traffic, rankings and links (OSE or Ahrefs.com can tell you that) in that case you don’t really need to update your disavow file from time to time.

Just a thought.

[ZoeRigley]

Hi,

I'd take caution, provided you haven't built any shady linking yourself. I would never recommend disavowing links which have been built naturally even if they are from somewhat unrelated websites, unless they are spam or seem maliciously built. Also, you should try to remove the problem links before you disavow them- read this post for some useful tips!

Hope this helps, 
Zoe

[MarieHaynes]

The answer to this depends on what kind of a link profile you have.

I have some clients for whom I do monthly disavows. These are sites that had a long history of unnatural link building and even though they're not currently building links, there are a lot of old links that keep surfacing.

For others I do a quarterly link audit and disavow. These are great for two reasons. One is that we keep the link profile clean but the other reason is that we get to see what new links are pointing to the site. I am often able to catch problem areas. For example, perhaps a new team member has started to venture on a link building tactic that's a little on the grey side. But in other cases, I can point out the really good links that they are getting and advise on doing more outreach to that content or perhaps building similar content.

If you are a regular site that has not been overly involved in low quality link building in the past and are not in a competitive space where you're really worried about negative SEO, then reviewing your links every 6-12 months is probably good.

[CleverPhD]

Great answer!  As an example, we have had issues on a site with negative link building from competitors and update 1x to 2x a year.

[GoAbroadKP]

Hi Marie! Thank you so much for your reply and I think what you have outlined makes perfect sense! We have never engaged in shady link building but didn't want to just overlook the fact that unnatural links can be built even without directly engaging in blackhat stuff! Since it has been 12 months (more or less), I will go ahead with an audit and make sure we are still on the right track!