One of the most important search ranking elements is website and page authority, which is determined by the amount and quality of backlinks. It’s also one of the areas of search engine optimization where you may outperform your competition. There’s also technical and on-page SEO, keyword research, web development, and content optimization, but you can only enhance so much in these areas.
A backlink is a link to your website from another website. In the eyes of search engines, backlinks are a bit like votes for your site. The more links you have, the higher your site is likely to rank in search engines. Not all backlinks are created equal, though. The best backlinks are ones from big, respected websites. Backlinks from spammy or suspicious websites can be actively harmful to your site.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to link construction. There are a lot of ways to get backlinks to your site, but the process always starts with using a backlink checker to check existing backlinks for your site, and your competitors have. As a result, you must have access to the best backlink tools. The finest backlink checker will help you find fresh link-building opportunities, learn about your competitors’ techniques, and keep track of the health of your backlink profile.
Here are the top 5 best tools to track backlinks of any website.
1. Semrush
Semrush is one of the best keyword research tools on the market, and it has lots of powerful tools to let you analyze backlinks. You can use Semrush to see check what links your site has, which could help you pinpoint any issues such as low-quality links. In fact, Semrush makes this easy for you by letting you see how many total links a page linking to you has.
If the page has hundreds of links, that can indicate that it’s a spammy website. When it comes to competitors’ backlinks, you can use Semrush to see which high-authority sites are linking to them, what keywords they are ranking for, and so much more. This can give you a whole list of sites to target for your own backlink building. And there’s lots of it at Semrush.
They include over a dozen tables and graphs that summarize your backlink profile, including backlinks by industry, nation, top-level domain, attribute, type, anchor, and authority score, as well as backlink history spanning five years. Semrush is an excellent tool for quickly creating appealing reports and getting a bird’s eye perspective of your or your competitors’ link-building efforts.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs backlink checker will 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.
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. Additional metrics associated with backlinks include domain and page authority, traffic, and anchor text and type. A short overview of the overall backlink profile is also provided, including the domain rating, total number of backlinks, and total number of referring websites.
3. Moz Link Explorer
Moz Link Explorer can give you a detailed link profile of your site, which you can compare with the profile of your 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. Moz also lets you see what backlinks you’ve lost. This gives you the chance to try to get those links replaced.
4. 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.
5. OpenLinkProfiler
OpenLinkProfiler is a free tool that lets you analyze the backlinks of any domain. 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, but it’s worth using if you can’t afford a paid tool.
Conclusion
Backlinks are critical factors in ranking high on SERPs. When improving your site’s SEO, always remember how adding external backlinks can go a long way. Plus, always look for link building opportunities to grow your site’s ‘votes’. Guest posting, shareable content like infographics, and broken link building are great ways to grow your backlinking profile. By using backlink checker (link analysis) tools, you can perform backlink audit and perform in-depth backlink analysis strategy. You can add stronger backlink to your site and get rid of unverified links that may hurt your site’s performance.