5 Best Free & Paid Online Backlink Checker Tools
Backlinks are considered as one of the most important factors in SEO by many marketers. Since the beginning of the SEO industry, it is the only aspect which has maintained its high value in the ranking algorithm.
According to SEO experts, finding one good source to get a backlink is very difficult nowadays. The Google algorithm has become so intelligent. It can immediately trace any unnatural linking activity and penalize sites automatically.
So many professionals conduct a competitor backlink analysis to check their competitor’s website backlinks. Finding a good new resource or performing a detailed fruitful competitor analysis with a free backlink checking tool is nearly impossible, but if they used collectively then you might get the best outcome.
Why Backlink Analysis?
- To know which sites are linking to your site or your competitor site.
- In order to capture the friend domains of your competitor into your friend zone.
- To compare your backlink profile with a strong competitor so that you can go stronger than them. (This is helpful to tell Google that you are a competitor of an already established site).
- To check your friends by seeing who is linking to you so that you can return them the favor.
Backlinks are generally classified in two ways
Dofollow backlinks and doesnot follow backlinks. When we create backlinks, we generally create dofollow links. Using backlink tester tools, we count how many backlinks we created for our site. A good number of backlinks can help improve the ranking of the page.
The following online backlink testers will help you see all incoming backlinks on your website. You can choose any of these tools based on your requirements. Some of them offer detailed results while others offer only the number of backlinks, but none of them need to register or sign up, which makes the process quick and easy.
Find backlinks to your site with these backlink checker websites
SEMRush
SEMRush is one of the most popular SEO tools out there and now it has added backlink analysis feature to its arsenal.
It is very good for analyzing keywords both organic and ad keywords. The data can be got in a graphical format.
Now that it has added a backlink checker feature all you have to do is:
- Go to the SEMRush homepage.
- Type the domain name, you want to analyze and hit enter.
- If you want to compare the domain names, there is a tab for that on the left corner. You can get a detailed list of referring domains, referring IPs, links from .gov and .edu sites as well as other TLDs.
- You can export it as PDF by clicking on the PDF button on the right top side.
The free version works pretty well unless you are one of those SEO analyst trying to lock horns with your competitor.
In case, you are one there is a paid version for $69.95/month which will give a more in-depth analysis.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the best tool in getting a backlink analysis of a competitor site or any site. It has been the winner of the test conducted by Matthew on one million domains for backlinks.
Aherfs is recognized by it’s up to satisfaction consumer support and detailed analysis. Its free version works for only three analysis while a fee of $79/month is charged to use the backlink checker tool in its full glory.
For a free analysis just go to the home page and type the URL of the website whose total backlink analysis you wish to do.
Then you get the complete analysis of the backlink profile of the site tested as shown in the image below. They provide a full analysis on a number of dofollow backlinks, nofollow backlinks, links as text and image backlinks apart from the basic .edu and TLD based searches.
It gives a clear diagrammatical representation of the number of social shares the domain has got and includes Google +1, tweets, and Facebook likes and shares.
The free account shows you the top ten results based on each search while the paid version has unlimited results.
You can export the searched result of backlinks thus generated into a .csv file in the paid version.
To export the report on the free version, follow this path.
Backlinks → external → backlinks → new/lost → export.
Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer is a great tool from moz.com and when a product is from Moz it has to be good. They help you to see who is linking to your competitor site filtering the report through domain authority, and anchor text used.
Comparing amongst a bunch of other sites is also possible and this helps in understanding the key strategies of your competitor to build high-quality backlinks.
Open site explorer is still not very capable of filtering results from spammy links (there may be many some with high page authority too) and thus you have to very vigilant in rejecting a backlink from the OSE result that can lead to harm your own SEO.
Open Link Profiler
This has been a favorite SEO tool for many. Open link profiler has the large database of freshest backlinks to a site which counts to the magical number of 2,00,000 backlinks to a domain.
They display links that are active in the last 90 days only so that you don’t have to deal with outdated stuff.
Their free version helps you download up to 100 links in CSV format. This feature is not provided by any major SEO tools like Majestic SEO, Ahrefs or open site explorer.
They have a link influence score for all sites so that you get an idea of the best-based pages on the basis of backlinks to it.
Google Alerts
Google alerts is the first thing that comes to mind when we think about monitoring a mention online. This easy to use tool can be used to get free alerts when your selected word/words are mentioned on the web. It can be your brand name, a product or your competitors’ name.
You can use it to monitor when your competitor is mentioned as a link on the web. The benefit is that the delivery is real time and thus could be helpful.