Runbook
Monthly runbook: pairing a backlink check with your rank log
Positions change daily and our link index changes monthly. This runbook keeps both on one calendar, so a story about links never claims more resolution than the data has.
Why the calendar comes before the chart
Analysts reach for a chart first. Wrong order. The chart hides the fact that your link data has one point per month while your rank data has thirty.
A monthly backlink check online gives you a bracket: the link was present on the first copy, absent on the second, and gone somewhere in between. That is useful for ruling things out, and almost useless for naming a day.
So the runbook below is built around brackets. You will log every event with a start and an end, and you will refuse to draw a line between a point and a bracket unless the dates genuinely overlap.
The output is a shortlist. Hypotheses, not findings. For the technical side of the same investigation, the suspect table lists what to rule out before links. A monthly habit also builds the archive that the diff recipe needs.
The runbook, in the order we run it
- 1
Fix the pull day
Choose one day each month, say the 5th, and keep it. Different days make two copies look further apart than they are.
- 2
Pull three things per domain
overviewis free. Addrefdomains(2 credits) andanchors(2 credits). Name files with domain, action and month, so nothing is overwritten. - 3
Write rank events as intervals
Open Google Search Console and note the first date impressions or clicks for a page group moved. Record a start and an end date, even if the end is only a day later.
- 4
Mark known outside events
Add Google updates, site releases and tracking changes to the same sheet. The March 2025 core update began on 13 March, the August 2025 spam update on 26 August.
- 5
Diff the two nearest copies
Use the diff recipe for lost and gained domains. Keep the counts and the five biggest by DR.
- 6
Test for overlap
A link event explains a rank event only if the brackets overlap and the pages involved are the pages that moved. Both conditions, not one.
- 7
Write the verdict in one of three words
Supported, unsupported or undetermined. Most months the honest word is undetermined, and that is a fine answer to hand a client.
The sheet: one row per event, never per month
| Event | Window start | Window end | Source | Pages touched |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rank drop, category pages | 2025-03-14 | 2025-03-19 | Search Console | /category/* |
| Lost referring domains: 6 | 2025-03-05 | 2025-04-05 | Two snapshots | Sitewide |
| Core update | 2025-03-13 | 2025-03-27 | Google status dashboard | Sitewide |
| Template release | 2025-03-13 | 2025-03-13 | Deploy log | /category/* |
In the invented sheet above, four events cover the same week. Links, an update and a release all overlap the drop. A careful analyst would write undetermined and move on to the cheapest test, which is reverting the template on a few pages.
Before you send the monthly note
- Every link claim has a window with two dates, not one.
- The pages that lost links are the pages that lost positions.
- A second tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush was checked for the same week, if you have one.
- Seasonality was considered: compare with the same month last year in Search Console.
- The note says the index is refreshed about once a month and may miss last week's links.
- You have a plain sentence on what would change your mind.