Introduction to Backlink Checking: A Vital SEO Strategy
Checking backlinks is one of the most crucial activities in the vast field of search engine optimization or SEO. It is a process of checking the quality and relevance of the backlinks pointing to your site or your client’s site. As backlinks are considered by Google and other search engines as one of the most important ranking factors, having constant control over your backlinks will affect your position on the SERPs. Lack of backlinks means that your website is exposed to low ranking in competitive search markets that are prevalent in the current world.
In this comprehensive guide, we will discuss each step of backlink checking and why backlinks are crucial, and how you can track yours and that of your competitors. We will also share the most popular backlink checker tools, how to conduct a link audit, and how to enhance your link building process.
After reading this article, you should know how to make backlink checks and audits, how to identify toxic links and how to create a quality backlink profile to help you rank higher in SEO.
What is link and why it is important?
Back links (also referred to as in bound links or inbound links) are hyper links from one site to another. From an SEO standpoint, quality and quantity of backlinks is an important factor in ranking. Whenever a website connects to another it means that, it is endorsing the content of the other website in terms of quality, relevance, and authority.
Learn how to check backlinks, analyze SEO performance, and use the best tools to boost rankings and improve your site’s authority.
Backlinks, as considered by search engines such as Google, are basically recommendations of a site’s content presented by other sites. High-quality backlinks are another factor and the more a website has the more likely it will be ranked high in the search engine result pages.
What Makes Backlinks So Important for SEO?
- Improved Search Rankings: Google employs backlinks as one of its primary ranking factors, but the importance of backlinks has been reduced over the years. Websites with more number of high quality backlinks are likely to have better ranking than websites which have less backlinks or low quality backlinks.
- Increased Organic Traffic: Backlinks are useful in generating traffic from other domains hence more visibility and most likely more conversion rates.
- Credibility and Authority: Having links from other authoritative and relevant sites enhance the credibility of your site to other search engines. This increases your DA and consequently, makes you more believable within your area of expertise.
- Faster Indexing: Backlinks also help search engines to find new pages on your site faster and therefore increase your site visibility in the search results.
- Competitive Advantage: Backlinks are another way of outcompeting rivals in the social media marketing space. Basically, by getting backlinks from such sources, you increase the likelihood of outcomping competitors in your industry.
In conclusion, backlinks are the backbone of every SEO campaign and should be at the heart of any strategy. Daily or weekly analysis of the backlink profile, the assessment of each link, and the identification of the possible problems that may occur allow for the enhancement of the website’s SEO.
How the Backlink Checker Tools Work
Backlink checker tools are programs that allow you to monitor and evaluate backlinks pointing to your site and to your competitors’ sites. These tools have the ability to crawl through the web and collect links and data that gives an overview of the quality, quantity and source of backlinks.
The core functions of backlink checker tools include:
- Collecting Backlink Data: These tools gather information about backlinks that link to a site and other information such as the source, anchor text, the type of link, and its value.
- Analyzing Link Quality: The tool will help to determine how good and relevant the backlinks are according to the domain authority, trust, and relevance to the specific niche.
- Tracking Competitor Backlinks: Most backlink checkers let you compare backlinks of competitors, which will assist you in determining what link building opportunities and gaps are present in your backlink profile.
- Providing Link Metrics: Link analysis tools give you other key parameters such as domain, page, citation, and trust to enable you to rate the quality of the links.
List Of Some Of The Most Popular Backlink Checker Tools
So, you can find a lot of backlink checker tools, and every of them has some peculiarities. The following are some of the most popular and effective options:
- Ahrefs: Ahrefs is one of the best all in one SEO tools out there. It provides both a backlink list and a possibility to analyze backlinks individually, including the assessment of the quality of the backlinks. Competitive backlink analysis and tracking are areas where Ahrefs stands out.
- SEMrush: Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that offers a profound backlink analysis overview, including referring domains, anchor, and link types. Backlink analysis has also been provided by SEMrush to allow users to quickly identify competitor link-building strategies.
- Moz Link Explorer: Moz has a tool called Link Explorer that looks at your link profile and gives each domain pointing to it a Domain Authority (DA) score. This enables you to know the most popular sites and the worth of the backlinks you have.
- Majestic: Another popular backlink checker is called Majestic which is also famous for its measures like Trust Flow and Citation Flow that can be used to assess the quality of backlinks.
Selecting the Right Backlink Checker Tool
When selecting a backlink checker tool, consider the following:
- Comprehensiveness: While searching for such tools, ensure that they contain huge backlink databases and do allow for greater link penetration analysis.
- Ease of Use: The usability of a system is a major factor, and this is made even more important if the users are novices. It is also important to be able to find tools with a practical control panel and clear reports.
- Competitor Analysis: Most of the tools provide the ability to view competitors’ backlinks, which is extremely helpful to fine-tune the work done.
- Price: There are also very many backlink checker tools out there, although some of them will cost you a lot of money while others are cheaper or even free. Estimate the cost of the tool and choose the one that will be relatively cheap for the value it provides.
Backlink Audits: What You Need To Know About Link Profile Maintenance
Performing a backlink audit helps in monitoring a link profile and ensures that it is healthy. A backlink audit is used to analyse the backlinks that link to your site to determine whether they are healthy for your SEO. This kind of audit will enable you to find out toxic links that are detrimental to rankings and have them removed.
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Process of Carrying out a Backlink Audit
- Collect Your Backlink Data
Log into the Ahrefs, SEMrush or Moz tool to acquire a list of websites that link to your site. Almost all the tools will give you an option to export this information to a spread sheet for analysis. - Evaluate Link Quality
Assess the quality of each backlink based on several key metrics, such as:- Domain Authority (DA): The higher the DA, the more authoritative the link is.
- Relevance: Links from sites in your relevant category are even more useful.
- Anchor Text: With your anchor text ensure that they are not similar and do not look like they were optimized.
- Link Type: While links pass the SEO value, the nofollow links also offer value by contributing to traffic.
- Identify Toxic Links
Bad backlinks can have negative impacts on your SEO process by penalties or by reduce the credibility of your site to the search engines. Look for:- Links from Spammy Websites: Having links from sites that contain lots of irrelevant information, low quality content or spam content will affect your ranking.
- Irrelevant Links: Links from unrelated sites are perceived as deceptive or unnatural because people will not naturally link to sites which are unrelated to their sites interest.
- Over-Optimized Anchor Text: Linking back to the same anchor text often can harm the site and can be considered as over-optimization by the search engines.
- Disavow Harmful Links
Google has the Disavow Tool that should be used to tell the search engines that they should not consider certain backlinks as they are negative. This tool instructs Google not to crawl certain links for your site and is useful in recovery from penalties. - Monitor Competitor Backlinks
There are a lot of ways that you can use your competitor’s back links to discover new back link building opportunities. Both Ahrefs and SEMrush provide you with a list of sites where your competitors get their backlinks, so you can target the same quality sources.
Link-Building Strategies for Long Term Results
Although backlink checking and auditing are important for keeping a clean backlink profile, active link building is the key to long-term SEO strategy. Here are some proven strategies to help you build high-quality backlinks:
1. Guest Blogging
It is quite important to note that guest blogging is one of the most efficient ways of creating backlinks. Guest posting on highly ranked blogs within your niche is a way of getting quality backlinks while also offering readers value.
2. Broken Link Building
Broken link building is a technique where you find the links that are no longer leading to working pages on other sites and then offer your own content in its place. It assist webmasters to locate and correct broken links which in turn benefits you by giving you a backlink.
3. Skyscraper Technique
Skyscraper technique involves identifying the best performing content in your particular industry or niche, creating better content than the one that is performing well and then contacting the websites that have linked to the former and kindly asking them to link to the new improved version of the same content.
4. Link Roundups and Resource Pages
Most websites even provide some form of list of useful links in their particular field of operation. These ‘Link Roundups’ or ‘Resource Pages’ are a good way of getting backlinks. Contact these sites and recommend to include your content in the list.
5. Infographics and Visuals
Writing shareable infographics or any other graphic content is the best way to get backlinks. Sharing visuals is always a fun, and websites like to link to infographics as a useful source.
6. Working with Influencers
One of the biggest benefits of working with influencers in your niche is that you can obtain important backlinks. Opinion leaders have many followers and their recommendation will bring traffic to your site as well as enhancing the backlinking.
Free vs. Paid Backlinks: What’s the Difference?
When it comes to backlinks, there are two primary types: free and paid. Both come with their advantages and disadvantages. It is crucial to know the difference between free and paid backlinks so that you can create a healthy and efficient link building strategy.
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Free Backlinks
Paid backlinks are those that any website gains or receives by paying for the same while free backlinks are those which are earned. They usually stem from the promotion of natural content or targeted communication.
Ways to Earn Free Backlinks:
- Guest Blogging: One way that I have seen people get backlinks for free is through sharing quality content on other related websites.
- Broken Link Building: Search for dead links on the websites related to your field and provide the visitors with the articles you write.
- Link Roundups and Resource Pages: A lot of blogs maintain resource lists or link lists and some may even create a roundup. You should note that by having your content appear on such pages you are able to get free backlinks.
- Creating Shareable Content: White papers, case studies, infographics, and any other good content pieces will be able to attract backlinks if the people will find it useful or shareable.
- Social Media Promotion: It is not always considered as an SEO strategy but if others share or refer to your post, then social media can lead to traffic and backlinks.
Advantages of Free Backlinks:
- No Direct Costs: There are no monetary costs attached to free back links.
- Organic and Authentic: They are, by default, organic, which are the best as per Google and other search engines.
- Sustainable: Free backlinks can be very useful for the proper SEO strategy for a long time.
Disadvantages of Free Backlinks:
- Time-Consuming: Obtaining backlinks for free is not an easy task, it includes outreach, content creation, and other related activities.
- Unpredictable: It’s impossible to know if you will receive the backlinks that you have set your sight on.
Paid Backlinks
Paid backlinks are backlinks that you buy with intention of having them placed on your behalf. This could be guest posting for a fee, link purchases from link selling networks or paying for link placement on rented sites.
Ways to Obtain Paid Backlinks:
- Paid Guest Posts: On some sites, you can pay to get your content published with a link back to your site as the only condition.
- Backlink Marketplaces: Some services offer to buy backlinks from different websites, most often from the sites that are within the same industry.
- Sponsored Content: This involves paying to place your content on other reputable websites, which often contains a link to your site.
Advantages of Paid Backlinks:
- Speed: Paid backlinks are easy to obtain, and thus, you can easily increase the scale of link building.
- Targeted: It also means that you can often buy backlinks in the desired niche and therefore directly target your audience.
Disadvantages of Paid Backlinks:
- Risk of Penalties: Link purchases from such sites attract Google penalties hence the need to avoid them. According to the Google guidelines, one cannot pay for or trade links for the sake of SEO.
- Short-Term Value: Paid backlinks may not be effective in the long run, if they are not from reputable or related sites.
One needs to be very careful while implementing paid backlinks strategy. As we have seen they can help in getting links faster, however, they should not be the center of your SEO planning. Free and natural links combined with paid and relevant links can be very useful to avoid getting caught in spam or spam links.
Frequently Asked Questions About Backlink Checking Link Building
Backlinks are one of the most crucial ranking factors in SEO, and checking your backlink profile is critical when you want to understand how your website is performing online. It would help if you were keen on the frequency of checking your backlink profile because the information you’ll get will determine the next course of action in your SEO strategy.
Ideally, you should do a backlink audit with at least three to six months interval to ensure you are managing your backlinks properly. However, if you are involved in link building or have recently been penalized by Google, it is advisable to more frequent check ups.
1. Are the Free Backlinks Helpful for SEO?
Yes, free backlinks are very useful for SEO purposes when they are from the relevant and authoritative websites. It is the quality of the link that count and not the cost of making the link.
2. How to Remove Harmful Links?
Google’s Disavow Tool helps you to disavow the backlinks that are negative in nature and affecting site’s ranking. This instructs Google to exclude specific backlinks when determining your site’s placement. However, it is crucial to use this tool wisely as disavowing good backlinks will be counterproductive to the website’s SEO.
3. Is It Safe to Buy Backlinks?
Link buying is dangerous and unlawful according to Google policies. In case you opt to purchase backlinks, it is recommended that they are from reliable sources and are related to your website’s content. Do not pay for links from link farms or any low quality websites.
4. How Can One Determine That a Backlink Is Good or Bad?
Good backlinks are those which are acquired from other sites with great authority and relevance of your niche. They should be mixed and acquired from natural link sources. The negative ones, however, are from spam or irrelevant websites; and the anchor text has been over optimized.
Conclusion
Link checking is one of the most important steps in the SEO process. To ensure that your backlink profile is healthy you should be taking your backlinks regularly, performing audits, and using free and paid link building techniques. Backlink checker tools should be used in order to evaluate the quality of your backlinks, monitor your performance and the performance of your competitors.
If you wish to read more information on how to increase traffic to the website, just check on the Ranksmagzine or contact me here.
