Ah, the good old’ backlinking. Great to know that the basics are still the same. We grow our business, spy on others, and hijack their plans and grow some more. It is somewhat similar to what America is doing with the world’s oil industry.
Right, stepping aside from criticizing our country, let’s focus on the topic. Turns out growing an online business is not child’s play. There are some 1.5 billion websites all over the world present today. Everyone is following the same rules, some of them have better teams than yours, and tools. So how to fight with them then?
Not only in the online marketing business but in the real world too, when you know what your competition is up to, the battle is half won already. For this very reason, top SEO teams always track the backlinks of their competitors. And what if I tell you that you can get these backlink tools on the internet, free of cost? Let’s unfold the carpet of wonder then, shall we?
But First, Why Should I Track Backlinking
If you are a pro, it is okay; you are most welcome to skip this part, let us beginners do the talk. In the simplest of words, backlinks are Google Spider’s navigation system. With backlinks, Google gets to know about new websites. Higher the number of backlinks, the higher the chances of a website reaching the top three in SERPs. Got it? Now here is the reason why people drool so much over backlinks:
· Okay, folks, the biggest reason behind observing backlinking of your rival is to know who is backlinking them.
· Second is to track the keywords they are using. Usually, SEO teams do it as a part of introspection, where they see which keywords are working for them well. After identifying the keywords, they reuse them in better ways, to get a boost in Ranking.
· To break their chain-friend cycle and make your own. In this trick we check who is backlinking our rivals and we give them a better offer to backlink our website.
· As it works as Google’s reputation establishing devices. AI is getting stronger, but it is still not that strong that it may differentiate which site is better; Google AI simply sees which site has more backlinks and their quality.
Now the Free Backlink Checker Tools for SEO
1. Ahrefs
I am going old school while starting my list, keeping the best tools at the top. When you go on backlink hunting, what is the first item on your bucket list? What is your opponent up to? Never in the history of backlinking has a business successfully taken down another one without spying on their backlinks or keywords.
Yes, it’s a cutthroat business, but someone has to do the dirty work, and Ahrefs is just the right platform to do that. As per data on their website, Ahrefs has the second most powerful crawler on the internet after Google spider. Let’s have a look at the stats you can use Ahrefs for:
1. They update their backlink data every fifteen minutes.
2. Ahrefs on an average crawl some 6.27 billion pages each day.
3. They have more than 170 million unique links.
4. 18.61 trillion Number of links the Ahrefs database has.
Another thing that I love about this tool is that it not only tracks the links but also let you check each one of them individually. It is quite handy when you want to check if a particular link is doing well or not.
2. CognitiveSEO
SEO experts simply love this tool; as it has too much to offer along with backlink tracking. But alas, even after being next to perfect, it is not as popular as other tools on this list. Personally, what I like the most about CognitiveSEO is its alert system. You can create notifications and triggers related to your competitors or your website. You don’t have to keep checking for updates as the information comes right through your mailbox. You can get real-time data, growth trends, historical info et cetera.
Their data is accurate, and easy to understand/decode, making cognitiveSEO the best backlink tracking tool for beginners. It comes with 14 days trial pack, which is a good part as even that has almost all the pro features.
3. SE Ranking
Keyword research, website audit, competitor rank checking… There is nothing that SE Ranking cannot do. And it is super economical! SE Ranking’s basic most pack starts from just $9 per month. This Google Webmaster’s favorite also allows you to check index or no index, follow, or no-follow links, anchor text, Alexa rank, date discovered, and Ahrefs rank.
Social popularity and MOZ Domain Authority are two of the rest several significant things you will be able to track the heck out of. Have links that you think are doing more bad than good? Well, you could now, disavow them too, thanks to SE Ranking.
4. SEMrush
You must have seen at least one advertisement about significant SEM in recent time. They are unfolding their wings in the marketing sector. SEMrush is going up so quickly that sometimes I wonder if they will crash and burn into nothing. With SEMrush you get a great deal, as their backlink tracker comes in its free trial version. The only thing that is a turn off for the free version is that the search options are limited.
Features
1. Backlink tool enables a person to track the anchor text of their page. This feature helps you to understand whether external sites are getting your keyword right or not?
2. An indicator showing how authoritative a domain linking to your website it is at the moment. You can let off or disavow any weak link that might be troubling your Ranking or that you do not trust.
3. You can see anchor texts too while tracking URLs and titles of target and linking web pages.
4. It enables one to compare the weight of inbound links one’s competitors’ domain/domains.
5. MOZ
An open site explorer is what the tagline reads. My brother has a team of SEO executives running his campaigns; they talk pretty high of this backlinking tool. Before writing this piece I did a lot of research on the tool to find out that both the paid and free versions are super useful. Yes, I bought the paid version, just because I like to say Moz Pro! What do you have? I have Moz Pro! Although my aunt Paulie is not talking to me anymore, it was worth it. There is a search bar where you can insert the URL you want to check. The page link metrics, along with the total number of links and new links, will pop out as a result.
Features
1. The great M allows you to see URLs and the names of pages that are bringing higher traffic to your website.
2. Are you worried about a ranking penalty? Well, do not be anymore. MOZ Pro checks the whole spam score thing, which will work as a wake-up call.
3. It also locates the best excellent link building opportunities for you.
6. LinkResearchTools
They say they are going to get the best results and they come very close to it. But are definitely pretty hard for it. A feature which is luring people in left, right and the center is their integration with data collected from more than 24 link backends. Then there is this stat which says that this tool analyzes each link using some 97 different metrics.
LinkResearch Tool allows you to check the power, trust, buzz, impact, and contact data. What feature I liked best about this tool are the removal of a Google penalty, spot link building trends, and discover link opportunities.
7. SEO Powersuite
SEO Powersuite is some 26 steps ahead of LinkResearch Tool, which sees it reviewing a link via some 50+ factors. It has a unique SEO SpyGlass tool which is handy for checking link building opportunities. SEO Powersuite will send you a convenient report which will help you with backlinking and crawling. This tool’s reporting technique is said to be the best thing about it; this is actually what we are fighting for right?
Another plus on the side of this Powersuite is that it has the most extensive backlink index on the World Wide Web.
Just like most of the other tools, this one helps you take a run a vast link quality analysis for making it sure that yours are coping well with Google spider or not.
8. Linkody
Linkody is eighth on my list; it is okay kind of backlink tracking tool. It tracks the backlinking of you and your rival website as well. It is fantastic for the purpose of keeping yourself updated on gained and lost backlinks, notifies you, every time you get or lose a link. They have a lengthy metrics profile making it a great SEO tool. Google penalty detector is also a great feature of this tool again. What pays well here is that it is available in a free thirty-day trial. Even with the free version, you get to check five different domains per week.
9. Kerboo
If I say that it is the best tool for the SEO team, you are going to leave a bad comment under this post, aren’t you? Well, this is the thing with SEO tools these days, they all are pretty impressive, and it is super hard to differentiate between them or to choose the best. If you have heard about this tool before you must have heard about its Monitor option too, which is the most popular. Which link is down or live, which link is removed or built, this is in a nutshell of what the monitor does.
You can, in this tool, create a list of the most important links you consider in your backlinking. Now, about this, if something unfortunate happens to your backlink, the device will keep you on the notification list for three days in the loop. This tool is also a great way of keeping bad links off your turf. It will not only identify the bad ones but will also make sure that they will not come back again.
10. Backlink Focus
And the tool only focuses on the backlinking, no other aspects of SEO. Users who do not want to get distracted by additional SEO tools, this one’s for you guys. You get to monitor backlinks, tracking who is backlinking to your domain and who is doing the same to your rivals. The filtering tool of Backlink Focus is quite famous for interpreting backlink quality, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Domain, MozRank, Spam Score, and Domain for each link.
The low-quality links are highlighted properly in this tool in an orange warning triangle. The orange triangle makes it easier to identify potential bad links.
Fading Out
Alright, then these are ten best backlink checker tools on the internet of the present time. I hope this post has given you the information you were seeking about the topic. SEO is a vast and vibrant topic, and one can write a lengthy book on backlinking alone. Ask any SEO expert and they will say that you have to keep on reading the right material to keep up to date.
On the other hand, some people mistake backlink tracking as a blackhat SEO practice. Cheating the search engine or manipulating how it works is blackhat SEO, not the backlink tracking. It is as whitehat as Uncle Sam living next door. Knowing what your competitors are up to can help you plan better for the future strategies. In other words, you are not doing anything illegal or unethical when you are indulging into the backlink tracking game. This is the concern of many people in general that Google might penalize them for this, which definitely it is not going to.
