Seo Backlink Tools, A complete guide to backlink tools that will help you build your SEO strategy. Whether you want to establish a link building campaign for your new website, keeping an eye on your competitor’s backlinks or just need a tool to analyze your own site and existing links.
Why are backlinks so relevant?
Search engines favor web pages that are authoritative for each keyword searched. That means those pages appear in the first places in the SERPs for those keywords or, even better, are placed inside featured snippets, which practically guarantees thousands of visitors each day.
To be considered authoritative by a search engine, the webpage must meet some conditions. One of them is to have as many backlinks as possible.
By now, you are probably thinking “well, that’s easy, I can place a lot of links to my page in other pages I own, and problem solved.” Nah-ah. I’m sorry, but it is not that simple. You don’t just need links — you need high-quality backlinks.
See, not all links are the same when it comes to SERP scoring. There are good links, that is, links that come from other authoritative pages for the same keywords. These will skyrocket your SERP positions. And then there are bad links, also called toxic links. You should avoid or get rid of these because they could nullify your whole SEO efforts.
A backlink can be considered toxic for many reasons, but all point to the same concept: a backlink is toxic when it is not authentic. A toxic link can be utterly artificial, for example, if it is placed on a page full of links to unrelated pages with even more unrelated content. That could be a payed-for backlink, and search engines hate that. All links in unsafe websites or in low-reputation pages are also considered toxic.
Link building strategies
Basically, any link-building strategy reduces to the same idea: generate links to your site on authoritative sites you don’t own. Are you wondering how you can do that? Well, first of all, you should know it is not easy. You need to discover hard-to-find opportunities, taking into account that your competitors are doing the same.
So, what you need are good tools to reveal those opportunities. Think about the gold rush: miners with the best picks and shovels had the best opportunities to find gold nuggets. We’ll talk about tools further below; first, let’s review some tips for which the tools could be used.
First of all, rule out the obvious backlink ideas. Yes, you can put a comment on a blog post, adding a link to your website, and it is possible that that link gets you some visitors. But chances are it won’t carry the SERP information search engines take into account to rise (or lower) your rankings. Most of that easy-to-post links are created with the “nofollow” attribute, which basically suggests search engines to drop all SERP information before crawling them.
“nofollow” is one of four attributes that can be added to a link in order to guide search engines on what to do with that link. There’s also the default “dofollow“, which is the opposite: it suggests the search engines carry the SERP information when crawling that link.
There are two more attributes: “ugc” and “sponsored“.
UGC means User Generated Content, and it could be used to mark links inserted in the content generated by the users of a website. For example, post comments or forum entries. Finally, “sponsored” is used to mark links created as an advertisement, sponsorship, or any other compensation agreement.
White hats and black hats
When talking about easy (or automated) link-building tactics, you will hear about “white hat” techniques and “black hat” techniques. As you have probably imagined already, a white hat is good, and a black hat is bad. Black hat refers to foul-playing tricks that could be dangerous for your SEO because search engines don’t like them, and if they discover you are using them, your SERP rankings could take a dive to the bottom of the search results.
So, let’s see some white hat techniques. Your first priority in this matter should be to work on your outreach. You need to identify potential websites that could benefit by placing a link to your site on theirs, get their contact information, and send them messages asking them to link to your site. But you don’t need to browse randomly to see who to send those emails. The right tool will show you the sites with the highest chances to accept your linking proposals.
Guest blogging is an old-school tactic that works pretty well. You have to offer bloggers to write a post for their blogs, with your name and a link to your site on it. There are lots of blogs that welcome guest bloggers, but you have to find them. If bloggers don’t take your guest blogging proposal, you can offer them to fix their broken links. That means detecting broken links, create content similar to the missing resource, and ask anyone linking to it to point to your content instead.
There are a lot more link-building tips you can use — you can find dozens of them on good blogs about SEO. But a comprehensive backlink strategy includes more than just link building. It also requires you to regularly check and monitor your backlink inventory. And that is something you can’t do manually. So let’s talk about backlink tools.
Backlink management tools
The huge number of existing tools to help people implement a successful backlink strategy could give you an idea of how important backlinks are. Inside this universe of tools, the most useful ones keep track of the mesh of backlinks on the whole internet and assist you in your link building and management activities.
Just don’t get dazzled by “magical” tools that promise to automatically generate backlinks to your site; always remember that link building is not an easy task, and it cannot be well performed by any automated tool. Be careful with link-building promises that employ black hat methods and could end up harming your SEO.
So, the best tools are the ones that give you a lot of information about backlinks that you could use to get the best results of your link-building efforts.
Let’s check out the top picks.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs holds one of the largest backlink indexes in the whole world.
Besides managing backlinks, Ahrefs is designed to perform most of the activities an SEO Pro needs to do daily, although it is pretty easy to use for non-Pros. But specifically in the backlink area, Ahrefs provides a lot of tools to do backlink research.
For example, one of these tools, called “Link Intersect,” lets you discover sites that link to your competitors but not to you. This is very useful information because if a site links to more than one of your competitors, there’s a good chance that it could add a link to your site.
Ahrefs offers a free version that lets you monitor ten backlinks and two domains per request. If you are willing to pay $ 82 a month, you’ll get a comprehensive analysis of your backlink profile, including image backlinks, dofollow/nofollow, anchor text, etc. Such information could prove invaluable in case you get a penalty from Google because it gives you figures about the anchor text ratio on your site.
The information provided by Ahrefs not only helps you with your link-building activities. It also shows lost backlinks and new backlinks to your site, so you can thank the webmaster or return the favor with a reciprocal link. For the lost links, you will be informed about the reason for the loss, so you won’t need to guess why it happened. The Ahrefs dashboard also shows suspicious links that you can disavow to avoid penalties.
Semrush
Within the Semrush, you can find the Backlink Analysis tool, a powerful aid for getting functional data about backlinks from any domain. With its huge database of 26,5 trillion backlinks, Semrush offers a lot of revealing charts showing new & lost backlinks, authority ranks of all referrals, the evolution of backlink generating processes, and much more.
With the Backlink Audit tool, you can integrate your Search Console data and avoid being penalized by Penguin. You can also discover and delete toxic backlinks and send them to Google’s disavow tool, keeping your backlink profile clean thanks to automatic and periodic tracking.
Besides backlink analysis, Semrush offers a full set of SEO tools you can use for free, for an unlimited time, but with limited functionality. This includes keyword research, monetizing analysis, traffic analysis, SERP position tracking, CPC mapping, and many more.
Moz
Moz Pro is a complete suite of professional SEO tools, in which Moz Link Explorer is one of the main utilities. It is especially useful to do reverse engineering on your competitors’ backlinks. To see its magic at work, you just have to enter a competitor’s domain or a specific URL, and Moz will show you all of its backlinks. For each backlink, you could see some metrics, such as a domain authority index, the number of linking domains, a spam score, and a list of the top links.
Its pricing plans range from $ 99 to $ 599 per month, depending on how many features and how “pro” you want to be in your SEO activities.
One of Link Explorer’s distinctive features is Anchor Text Analysis, which shows the most common anchor text in a website’s backlink profile. Many would ask what the use of this feature is, and the answer is that it helps to detect black hat linking techniques: if there’s a lot of exact match anchor text, it could be a sign of fraudulent tactics.
Although Moz’s database is not as big as Ahrefs’, its subscription fee includes several other tools besides Link Explorer, which could be worth paying for.
Conclusion
Seo Backlink Tools, A complete guide to backlink tools that will help you build your SEO strategy. Whether you want to establish a link building campaign for your new website, keep an eye on your competitor’s backlinks or just need a tool to analyze your own site and existing links.
SEO Backlink is the only requisite for immensely improving your Search Engine Ranking in Google, Bing or Yahoo. Backlinks are in numbers and quality both. The purpose of the article is to provide you with an extensive review of the tools which can help you in improving your SEO.