Every website out there aims to rank among the top searches on a search engine like Google or Bing. But Google’s algorithms have reached quite a sophisticated point where your ranking depends on several important elements. One of these elements are backlinks, which remain a core part of a successful SEO strategy. Simply put, backlinks are links that other websites use to refer to yours. This serves as a signal that your website shows content which is relevant and worth referring to.
Backlink Checker Tools
Enough backlinks should technically increase your domain authority and thus improve your chances of Google putting you higher in the ranking. However, thanks to its current algorithms, Google is also great with determining if other websites are trustworthy and if their opinions even matter. If not, backlinks from those websites can even end up harming you. And that’s why it’s important for you and your SEO to regularly perform a backlink analysis. It provides you with a way to monitor the quality of your backlinks as well as some useful insights about optimization of your backlink strategy. To help you discover the potential that backlink checker tools have, we created a list of some of the most popular free options.
1. Seobility
The free version of Seobility provides several useful metrics either for a specific URL or a whole domain. But there are also some major limitations. Perhaps the most important one, is that when you register for a free plan, you only have access to 5 backlink checks per day that will show you the top 400 results. That means that if you plan to perform the backlink checks daily, you will need to be selective.
On the other hand, this backlink checker provides you with data about anchor texts along with link type and Nofollow or Dofollow attributes, backlink domains and also link ratings. It also provides a general overview of your total backlinks, referral domains and your own domain rating.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools right now. You can find out why in its free version of the backlink checker. While the amount of data you have is quite limited, you can still find valuable information while using it. More specifically, you can only view data about the top 100 backlinks on any website.
On the other hand, you can perform any number of checks per day. Results will provide you with domain and URL rating, amount of traffic and also anchor text and whether the link is Dofollow or Nofollow. It also allows you to see how many backlinks and referring domains you have in total.
3. Google Search Console
While this free backlink checker can provide up to 1000 top backlinks, Google Search Console shows very limited results and does not itself provide a lot of information. However, you are able to easily export the data and analyze them elsewhere. The access requires a verification that you are the owner of the website. This also means that you will not be able to analyze backlinks of your competitors. But the reason why this tool is especially interesting for analysis is that it only shows you the links which are considered important for high Google ranking. In other words, it removes the low quality links and thus gives a good indication that there might be some issue worth checking into.
4. SEO SpyGlass
Even for a free version of the tool, SEO SpyGlass is one of the most advanced options out there. Despite the free version being limited, its functionality seems to offer quite a lot. It provides you with a detailed dashboard for easy management within the tool. There are several filter options to find out exactly what you want to know about specific backlinks. You could for example check how pages are linked, whether they are of Dofollow or Nofollow, domain authority and even the penalty risk score.
You can research as many pages as you want, although only up to 1100 backlinks per one domain and no option to save the analysis. As the name SpyGlass suggests, this backlink checker allows you to spy on your competitors. With its Domain Comparison feature, you can compare 2 domains and see the backlink analysis of both. And if you still need additional data, it also lets you connect with the results from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and work with them on the SEO SpyGlass dashboard.
5. OpenLinkProfiler
Apart from most backlink checkers, which usually try to give you a free taste in order to sell a more advanced package, OpenLinkProfiler is completely free to begin with. It was created by SEOProfiler, which is not free. With OpenLinkProfiler you can check any domain and get access to all backlinks linking to your website.
Moreover it provides you with an option to download 1000 links per website, considering you also create a free account. Overall, it gives you a good overview of the results, which you can sort in a lot of ways and see a large amount of data like age of the backlinks, their anchor text and link destination or even if the link is a Nofollow.
6. Rank Signals
Rank Signals – a completely free backlink checker tool offers a fair amount of data. All you need to do is to register an account and type in the URL of the page you wish to look into, which means you can also use it to check on your competitors.
Additionally, you can find deleted and broken links, identify toxic links, show Link Signals and Metrics like PageRank and Alexa rank, and even see which backlinks are Nofollow or Dofollow. To top it all of, there is also a chrome extension available, so checking websites’ backlinks is more convenient.
7. Backlink Watch
The first thing you probably notice when using Backlink Watch, is that it takes a relatively long time to finish the analysis and show results. However, since it’s free, some drawbacks are to be expected. On the other hand, it can show you quite a bit of useful data about 1000 backlinks on either your site or competitor’s. These data include anchor text, page rank and total outbound links for that page. Additionally, it also shows which of the backlinks have nofollow flag. Once the analysis is finished you can also sort the results by several categories.
Conclusion
Since all of these backlink checker tools can be used for free, there are naturally some limitations. However, they are often limited in different aspects. This gives you an opportunity to maximize your benefits by thinking about possible combinations, that would suit your situation the most. That way, you can still use free options while getting a large amount of helpful information. In turn, you can use this information to optimize your SEO strategy and make use of the full backlink analysis potential.
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