Did you know backlink is a strong pillar in SEO that cannot be neglected? the same backlink has the good and bad side of it but the bad side can be prevented if monitored. With the help of these backlink checker tools that lets you monitor and know where your links are coming from.
There are lots of backlink checker tools online, but, not all are accurate in terms of indexing. In this post, I will be listing the top most used tools/sits for checking your blog/website backlink, firstly let discuss what backlinks are made of.
What is a backlink?
A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one webpage to another website these links are important in determining the popularity (or importance) of your web site, they are also classified by quality, types, and source.
Recently I published a post on link building, how to build quality links, where to build links and keep a good backlink profile.
As webmasters, we tend to build more links to our site either by commenting on other blogs, submitting a guest post or through forums (whichever way that works perfectly for you) but we hate the term spammy links (you should avoid them)
Why you should check your site backlinks
As you may know, link building is also a ranking factor especially when it comes to quality. Quality links are capable of boosting your post on SERPs and when I say quality I mean dofollow links, brand mention and also links from high-quality sites like Wikipedia, Forbes, Medium, etc.
Things you should watch out for when checking your site backlink
Domain Authority
This is an important area to watch out for, a domain with high authority will give a boost to yours, after Moz 2.0 update many sites lost their DA (Domain Authority) due to low authority site linking to theirs.
Spam Score
Who else hates spammy links as much as I do? getting backlinks from sites that have high spam will only destroy your site and are capable of stopping your site for ranking on some search queries. The more links you get from a high spam score site the higher your chance of increasing yours.
Know what your competitors are doing
Whatever niche we found ourselves we all have competitors, those who always want to do better than you, no matter how less competitive your niche is there must be someone out there chasing you and you have to be security-wise.
Your competitors are not your friend, recently I saw a post on a forum about someone who built thousands of spammy links to his/her competitor’s site just to take it down from SERPs. Surely it will take a bad turn for that site and if the owner is not quick enough to discover those links and disavow them, the site might lose all of its rankings which also leads to low traffic and low income.
Link opportunities
There is no better way to know where your competitors are getting those rich links, these backlink checker tools allow you to analyze any site and see what site they are getting links from even google.
What are backlink checker tools?
A backlink checker is an online site that analyzes and fetch your backlink profile within seconds, links you’ve gotten from other sites showing the type (image or text) quality (dofollow or nofollow). Some of these tools also show the date your link was found and lost on a site.
Link-type
When it comes to link type, it really simple, this helps you differentiate if your links are text, image, dofollow/nofollow, or 301redirects links.
Below is the list of free backlink checker tools I have gathered
Moz
Moz as to come first on the list, because, when we talk about domain authority what comes to mind is moz.com. the only place you can get the true result the term DA was invented by Moz to show the quality, hard work and popularity of a particular site and can only be archived through backlinks, Moz allows you to use their service when you register a free account and get 10 search queries every month.
If that is not enough, you can start 30 days free trial with 20,000 queries no hidden charges completely free for 30 days, upon analyzing your site backlink you get to see any site with high spam score this is linking to yours plus their domain authority.
Ahrefs
According to Incapsula, Ahrefs has the second most active web crawler after Google, which means they have the best backlink database in the industry, Ahrefs fetch new links within 24hrs and sometimes takes longer time depending on where you’re getting your links from.
Ahrefs lets you analyze unlimited domains for free (no registration is required) but only displayed a hundred (100) result out of the total result (i.e if you have more than 100 backlinks) with your domain authority with that of other sites linking to your domain. If you would like to do more and explore deeper you can start a 7 days free trial for 7 dollars, affordable right? I know you can do it.
Semrush
Here is another backlink checker tool used by almost every webmaster most especially the SEO gurus, Semrush offers 10 queries daily when you sign up a free account, this tool is a bit similar to Moz with different functionality, semrush also offers a free trial, no hidden charges, if you enjoy the service you can purchase it once your trial is over.
Checkout: Semrush Backlink Checker Free Trial
Ubersuggest
Everything is free, enjoy your stay while it lasts, I really don’t use this tool most of the time but trust me, you will enjoy the result you get from ubersuggest.
This tool is owned and mastered by Neil Patel and is completely free, ubersuggest also have other SEO benefits like that of keyword analyst. You should give it a try.
Google Webmaster
Did you know you can also check your backlink profile with google webmaster? Yes, you can, many don’t use this service since it is more useful for tracking your success on Google SERPs.
How to check backlinks on Google webmaster
It easy and simple, if you haven’t tried this before let me walk you through in three (3) steps.
Step1
I believe every blog owner knows what it means when you hear the word, google webmaster. You must have been using it for a while now, sign in to your google webmaster using your google account.
If you are new to this, submit your website link and do the needful.
Step 2
Navigate to the menu by the left then click on links. (if you are just submitted your link, you have to wait for some hours for google to fetch your data)
Step 3
On the new page that displays, scroll down a bit to find to the linking site, click on more to see the total backlinks fetched by Google.
Google webmaster is free, the only difference is you can’t see the link type, it only shows linking pages and targeted pages.
Recommended: Free Online Seo Tools
Other backlink checker tools I excluded from the list and reasons.
Smallseotools
This tool is also nice when it comes to checking plagiarism, it was not added to the list because they get their result from ahrefs and sometimes it’s not accurate.
Note: avoid generating free backlinks from this site, they are all spammy links.
CheckMoz
I don’t know if Moz knows about this site, they are also good but can’t make it up to my list, they fetch their data from MOZ. checkmoz only show your total backlinks but won’t list them
Alexa
Alexa is not really a backlink checker tool, it a complete marketing tool. It was not added to the list because you won’t be satisfied with the analyst and their backlink database index is very slow, you can try it out but they don’t work for me.
Conclusion
Building links is an amazing part of SEO as they help you boost your blog ranking, but, remember to build quality links. You can check out my post on link building strategies it will help you on where and how to get quality links that won’t harm your site.
If there are any online backlink checker tools you have tried that was not included on my list, please mention them using the comment box, I will make sure to check it out.
Mind you, backlinks don’t get indexed immediately by these tools, some take months and maybe 24 to 48 hours depending on the site the link is coming from as mentioned earlier.
