Backlinks are one of the most important factors in search engine ranking. Good backlinks help your website but bad ones can hurt it by decreasing its rank on google and other engines.
A backlink checker is a great way to ensure you have good, quality links pointing towards your website. By using an online backlink checker you can see the health of your link profile meaning you will be able to see which of your sites are suffering from low quality backlinks and remove them.
OpenLinkProfiler
OpenLinkProfiler is a free tool that lets you analyze the backlinks of any domain. It comes from SEOProfiler (a paid tool) and gives you free access to link data.
You can download 1000 links per website, though you’ll need to create an account in order to that. You can also filter and sort results, view which links are nofollowed, and more.
There are loads of different options for filtering backlinks, and you can even take a look at when a site’s links were acquired:
Given that it’s free, it offers an impressive number of options and a large volume of data. It’s not going to be a match for all the features and power of paid tools like SEMRush, but it’s worth using if you can’t afford a paid tool.
Price:
OpenLinkProfiler is free. You’ll need to create a (free) account and sign in to access some features.
Moz Pro
Moz Pro, the suite of SEO tools from Moz, includes their Link Explorer tool.
Link Explorer can give you a detailed link profile of your site, which you can compare with the profile of up to 4 competitors. This lets you figure out what they might be doing differently from you.
It also has a handy tool called Link Intersect, where you can see which sites are linking to your competitors but not to you. These sites are great ones to target for building links.
Like the other tools we’ve looked at, Moz also lets you see what backlinks you’ve lost. This gives you the chance to try to get those links replaced.
As well as the backlink tools, you’ll also get access to all Moz’s other SEO tools. These include Campaigns to track and analyze your site, Rank Checker to evaluate your search engine performance, and more.
Price:
Moz costs from $99/month ($79/month paid upfront annually). There’s a 30 day free trial, though, which gives you full access to all their tools.
Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an excellent SEO tool that lets you get information on different sites for free. While using the backlinks checker tool, you can see all the links pointing to your site by typing the URL on the search box.
It’s simple to use, making it perfect for a beginner to analyze competitors’ links. You can perform multiple checks on web-links and collected data in an organized datasheet. Every report has various tabs, including external backlinks, anchors, keywords, raw reports, referring domains, rank reports, and more. Further, you can sort out the results to get specific details.
You can use it online instead of downloading it, and it also categorizes ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ links in the inbound reports.
LinkMiner
LinkMiner is designed specifically to check backlinks. It’s a tool from Mangools, so you’ll need a Mangools account in order to use it.
As with other tools, LinkMiner lets you filter links by nofollow, deleted, new, and lost.
One handy feature you’ll want to try is the ability to ‘favorite’ backlinks, so you can come back to them easily. This could be a great way to make a shortlist of competitors’ backlinks to target.
You could also use this feature to keep track of any of your own backlinks that you want to fix. For instance, you could create a list of lost backlinks that you want to concentrate on recovering.
While LinkMiner isn’t as fully featured as SEMRush, it is a great option if you’re on a tight budget.
You’ll likely want to use it in conjunction with Mangools’ SiteProfiler to view details like a site’s total backlinks and top referring domains.
Price:
You can take a completely free 10 day trial without needing to enter any credit card details. After that, you’ll need to pay $29/month.
This fee covers all Mangools’ tools. These are LinkMiner, KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, and SiteProfiler. It’s a great budget option.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a tool from Neil Patel. The main tool offers keyword research features, but there’s also a Backlinks tool that you can use to view details of your site’s backlinks.
Ubersuggest has similar features to the other tools we’ve been looking at. For instance, it can show you new backlinks, backlinks you’ve lost, which backlinks are marked as nofollow, and more.
You can use the free version to see this information, but you’ll only get details of a small number of backlinks for each domain. You need to upgrade to the paid version of Ubersuggest if you want everything.
Ubersuggest’s other tools can analyze traffic, and help you come up with keyword and content ideas.
Price:
Ubersuggest’s free version can give you a good sense of what the tool can do. To do any serious backlink analysis, you’ll want the Pro version which costs $29/month, or $290/year if you pay upfront.
There’s a 30-day “no questions asked” money back guarantee.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is designed to let you analyze your content and your competitors’ content. It’s a great way to come up with topic ideas, but you can also use it to help you with your backlink strategy.
You can simply type in a keyword or a domain name to see the most popular content for that keyword, or the most popular content on that domain. You can then click the link icon next to any of the results to see the backlinks for that piece of content.
You can even type in the URL of a specific piece of content and see just the backlinks that point to that. This could be a great way to see which sites are linking to your competitors’ top posts.
Their straightforward Backlinks tool lets you find the pages linking to a specific URL or domain. This is an easy way to see your competitors’ backlinks at a glance.
You can easily filter the backlinks to view ones from various periods of time between the past 24 hours and the past 5 years.
Price:
The basic version of BuzzSumo is free. For in-depth backlink analysis, though, you’ll need to upgrade to BuzzSumo Pro. It costs from $99/month, or $79 if you pay annually.
There’s a 7 day free trial available, too. You don’t need to enter any credit card details for this.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another powerful keyword research tool. Like SEMRush, it’s easy to use. It’ll give you an overview of your chosen domain, and you can drill down to look at lots of details of backlinks.
Ahrefs also makes it really easy to see backlinks that you’ve lost. These are links you once had that have now vanished. Perhaps the website owner deleted the page that linked to you, for instance.
You can also identify backlinks that are broken. These are links that point to your site, but using a broken URL that lands on your 404 page. You might need to contact the site owner to fix them.
When examining competitors’ backlinks, you can filter these by ‘Link type’ and pinpoint domains that you want to target yourself.
You can also use Ahrefs to examine internal links on your site. You can filter these to check for internal links you’ve accidentally nofollowed, so you can fix those.
Price:
You can take a 7 day trial of Ahrefs’ Site Explorer for just $7. After that, it’s priced from $99/month. If you pay for the year up front, it’s $82/month.
Once you enter a link on the platform, you can derive lots of details, such as the level of influence in a specific URL. It also shows you a graph on domains and backlinks progress. Additionally, you can tell the amount of organic traffic your site has gained over time.
Pros
- Accurate Data
Cons
- Expensive
- Only organic traffic data
Linkody
Linkody is a straightforward tool that lets you know when your backlinks drop or when new ones emerge.
It features white-label reporting to give you regular updates on link-building strategies.
Additionally, you learn the SEO value of your site’s backlinks from standard rank metrics of big players like Majestic, Moz, and Alexa.
It also has the disavow rule generator to assist in keeping spam links at bay.
It has easy to comprehend dashboard with important link metrics that give an overall review of your link profile based on Google algorithms. Moreover, Linkody crawls to look for fresh backlinks that point to your site. It also gives you useful data on your competitors’ SEO techniques. Still, it sends you email reports on new links for your domain.
SEMRush
SEMRush is an excellent tool that lets you search for keywords, check backlinks, and spy on competitor’s ranks.
It’s a perfect marketing tool that can help you in online ventures via various apps such as advertising toolkit, Social media toolkit, SEO toolkit, content marketing toolkit, and more. It also offers you a free trial on the pro membership.
With SEMRush, you get access to massive information, including how your competitors have found success. You can use it to perform the following functions;
- Get link-building opportunities.
- Tweak your site to achieve higher rankings.
- Create web content to attract more traffic.
Additionally, the platform can help you approach the websites that are worth your backlinks and phrases that would be hard to rank.
Pros
- Tons of tools
- Accurate data
- Largest SEO Tool
Cons
- Learning Curve
- Expensive for some
CognitiveSEO
CognitiveSEO is a checker that offers you various tools to help with insights and analyses to improve your SEO campaign. Whether you run an established enterprise or a small business, this tool will help you increase traffic. Additionally, it aids in establishing the best digital marketing techniques.
If your site has any SEO problems, CognitiveSEO flags all the issues and provides the best mechanisms to improve your visibility. It features a comprehensive site audit that influence rankings, Google penalty prevention and recovery, Content optimization, keyword search, and much more. Further, it has an analysis process to enable you to get every critical data for internet marketing. You can also monitor the link building strategies that your competitor uses to come up with better tactics.
Conclusion
There are many on-page SEO oriented tools available, but recurringly some backlink checkers have proved to be on top of the SEO industry for more than a decade now. For that reason, I made this review and trust to help tackle all of my backlink-related questions.