Mistakes and fixes
Free inbound link checker steps for seven pruning mistakes
Pruning old posts is healthy until it deletes the three pages other sites were quoting. Here is each way it goes wrong and the check that stops it.
Editor's note
Most lost links are lost by tidy people
The usual victim is a post with few clicks and a lot of citations. Traffic reports hide it. A free inbound link checker lookup on the domain, then a top-pages pull, surfaces it in minutes.
- Mistake 1 to 3 are about what you delete
- Mistake 4 to 7 are about how you redirect and measure
Seven mistakes, each with its fix
- 1
1. Pruning on traffic alone
A post with 12 sessions a month can hold 30 referring domains. Fix: sort the audit by referring domains before you sort by sessions, and read the top twenty by hand.
- 2
2. Ignoring URL variants
Links often point at the http, www or trailing-slash version. Fix: look up each variant and add the counts, then redirect all of them.
- 3
3. Counting links instead of sites
Forty links from one blogroll are one signal. Fix: use the referring-domains column and keep a note of the strongest three linkers.
- 4
4. Redirecting everything to the homepage
A mass redirect to the home page tells readers nothing and gives Google a weak match. Fix: pick the closest topical page, and write the reason in the sheet.
- 5
5. Merging without keeping the quoted sentence
The anchor said 'free template for X' and the merged post no longer has it. Fix: read the anchors column and keep the claim each anchor describes.
- 6
6. Trusting one tool's rating
DR from one provider and DA from another disagree. Fix: compare within a single tool, and treat Contentwise DR as our own number.
- 7
7. Auditing once and never again
Links appear and vanish. Fix: repeat the top-pages pull each quarter; the index refreshes about monthly, so more often adds nothing.
A concrete order of operations
Start with the free domain lookup. If the rating of the whole site is tiny, the pruning stakes are low and you can move fast. If it is large, slow down.
Next, call toppages on your domain and keep the first 50 rows. Mark every URL with five or more referring domains, a bar drawn by us for example's sake, as untouchable for this round. That list alone prevents mistakes 1 to 3 on most sites. It costs two credits.
Last, write a one-line reason beside every prune in the sheet, and date it. When a colleague asks in March why the shipping guide vanished, the answer is a cell, not a memory.
Use Search Console as a second opinion. It is free. Google's Links report is first-party, so it lists links Google has actually recorded for your property, while our index is a separate crawl refreshed about monthly. Where the two agree, you can act. Where they differ, trust Search Console for your own site and treat our figure as a rough second view.
Do not forget the human side. Tell authors early. Tell them before a post goes. Some of the best citations come from pieces a freelancer wrote years ago and still shares with a client. One email costs nothing. See the decision tree for the order of checks.
A redirect passes most of what a link was worth when the target matches the topic, but it is never a guarantee. If a page has strong citations, refresh in place instead of moving it.
Mistake versus damage
| Mistake | Likely damage | Time to catch |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic-only pruning | High | Weeks, after a drop |
| Variant blindness | Medium | Months |
| Mass homepage redirect | Medium | Immediate if you look |
| Lost quoted claim | Low to medium | Never, usually |
| One-off audit | Low | Next year |