The SEO Link Audit Checklist That Actually Matches What Google Sees

Most “link audits” start with a crawl export and a spreadsheet. That works until the page you care about is a guest post, a client site, or a SPA that only exposes real links after JavaScript runs. Then the spreadsheet and the rendered page disagree—and the disagreement is where money walks out of the room.

A useful SEO link audit answers three questions for every link on a URL you care about: is it internal or external, what rel policy does it carry (follow, nofollow, sponsored, ugc), and does the placement still match what you paid for or negotiated? LinkGlow’s analyzer is built for that page-level truth: paste a URL, get a server-side render, and classify the links captured from the rendered DOM—not a guess from raw HTML.

What to capture on every page audit

• Full absolute URLs after redirect resolution, not just relative hrefs
• Internal vs external classification that respects your own multi-domain properties
• rel tokens as Google documents them: nofollow, sponsored, ugc (and combinations)
• Anchor text and surrounding context for placement verification
• Broken destinations (4xx/5xx after following redirects) when you run a health check
• A shareable snapshot so a client can see the same page you audited

Internal links are not “set and forget”

Internal linking still moves crawl budget and equity between URLs you control. An audit that only counts external links will miss orphaned hubs, accidental nofollow on nav, and content blocks that never link to money pages. Treat internal links as first-class: same classification, same broken-link pass, same before/after when templates ship.

Domain groups: when “external” is really you

Agencies and multi-brand teams routinely own several hostnames. If your tool always treats other brands as external, your internal metrics lie. Domain groups in LinkGlow let you mark sister properties as internal for classification so dashboard stats match how you actually think about the graph.

A checklist you can run in under five minutes

• Paste the live URL into LinkGlow (landing demo or a signed-in audit)
• Scan the Glow view for unexpected nofollow or missing placements
• Filter the links list to external + nofollow and external + follow
• Open Page SEO for title, canonical, and robots surprises that affect how equity flows
• Save tracked links for any placement you cannot afford to lose
• Export CSV/PDF if a client needs a handoff, not a Zoom tour of your screen

Next step

Run a free analysis on a page you already know well. If the classified links match what you expect, scale the same workflow to client placements. If they do not, you just found the gap between “we bought a link” and “the page still ships the link.”