One of the metrics for measuring growth is an increasing backlink portfolio. As the quality and quantity of your site's content increase, so should your inbound links. But sometimes this may not be the case as the number of your backlinks may remain the same.

It becomes more worrisome when your backlinks reduce in number, instead of increasing. While it is normal for some backlinks to disappear as you will soon find out, it is important to know why they do and how to prevent this.

This tutorial presents you a guide on how to discover and prevent your backlinks from declining, and also ways to help you improve the quality and quantity of your backlinks.

How to Discover Missing Backlinks

The first step towards improving your backlink portfolio is to find the missing ones. And to do this quite well, there are two different ways of going about it.

I. Doing it Yourself

If you do not have a budget for your backlinks, this is the better option for you. What you need to be effective at this is the use of historical data.

I expect that you crawl your backlinks at frequent intervals. And if you don't, now would be the best time to begin to run and record historical data.

You can make use of SEO tools such as SEMRush or Screaming Frog for that. Each time you crawl for historical data, compare and contrast with the previous data.

By the way, weekly would be appropriate to crawl your backlinks for historical data. From the records before you, it will be easy to detect if there's any difference in backlinks.

II. Using the Link Analyzer

This option is best if you do not have a record of historical data for your backlinks. You can use any of the link analyzers that grant users access to a large index of historical data. Again, tools like Majestic SEO or Ahrefs should be able to furnish you with that.

While Ahrefs gives you 2 months of historical data, you get more from the paid version. Majestic SEO can give you up to 5 years of historical data, but it comes with Pro access. With this data, you will be able to find out if there's any drop in your backlinks.