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. The sky's the limit when it comes to link construction.
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. In this article, we'll look at some of the top backlink checkers available, as well as one additional condition – they must be provided for free in some form, either whole or partially.
Backlink analysis and management are made easy with SEO SpyGlass's fully customizable interface. SpyGlass allows you to sort and filter the detected backlink data using any of the several dozen backlink attributes, unlike other free checkers:
The number of backlinks you can access for free is restricted to 1,100 per domain, but you can check an unlimited number of domains, allowing you to analyze both your own and competitor websites. You can also connect SEO SpyGlass to Google Search Console and Google Analytics if you want more information. Once you've joined, you'll be able to get your backlink data from Google tools, import it into SEO SpyGlass, and process it using the SEO SpyGlass dashboard - all for free.
SEO SpyGlass also has a function called Domain Comparison that may be used to find new backlink chances. Add a couple of your rivals and look for websites where their backlinks cross. These are the websites that will provide you with immediate leads. Because these websites link to two or more of your competitors, it indicates that they do not have an exclusive relationship with you and will most likely agree to link to your website as well.
Best for SEO SpyGlass is best utilized as your home base for backlink research and maintenance, with comprehensive analytics and the highest data allotment on this list.
Google Search Console is a tool designed to assist webmasters in improving their websites. It's free, however, it may only be used to assess your websites. After your ownership has been verified, you'll have access to several site quality dashboards, one of which is a list of backlinks pulled directly from Google's index. You can only see the top 1,000 results, no matter how big the list is. There are no further metrics or analytics capabilities available on the site, but you can export the data and examine it with other tools.
The backlink lists generated by Search Console are typically substantially shorter than those generated by other backlink analyzers. Google Search Console is a tool designed to assist webmasters in improving their websites. It's free, however, it may only be used to assess your websites. After your ownership has been verified, you'll have access to several site quality dashboards, one of which is a list of backlinks pulled directly from Google's index. You can only see the top 1,000 results, no matter how big the list is. There are no further metrics or analytics capabilities available on the site, but you can export the data and examine it with other tools.
The backlink lists generated by Search Console are typically substantially shorter than those generated by other backlink analyzers.
Google Search Console is a tool designed to assist webmasters in improving their websites. It's absolutely free, however, it may only be used to assess your own websites. After your ownership has been verified, you'll have access to a number of site quality dashboards, one of which is a list of backlinks pulled directly from Google's index. You can only see the top 1,000 results, no matter how big the list is. There are no further metrics or analytics capabilities available on the site, but you can export the data and examine it with other tools.
The backlink lists generated by Search Console are typically substantially shorter than those generated by other backlink analyzers.
Seobility can be employed in two different ways. One option is to go over your own website and see if there are any links that Search Console and SEO SpyGlass have missed. The second step is to look at your competitor's backlinks to learn more about their strategy.
The Ahrefs backlink checker allows you to perform an infinite number of checks every day, but you can only view the top 100 backlinks. 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.
For a rapid exploration of your own or your competitors' websites, utilize this checker in conjunction with Seobility. Because Ahrefs does not have a daily limit, it should be used first. Switch over to Seobility to retrieve another several hundred backlinks if it looks like there might be something interesting beyond the initial 100 backlinks.
The majority of the tools on this list try to entice consumers by allowing them to access only a portion of the backlink tables before demanding payment to see the rest. SEMrush has taken a completely different approach. It provides a lot of backlink metrics but none of the backlink lists. So you may look at the high-level information for free, but if you want to go deeper, you'll have to pay for a subscription.
This is fine because high-level statistics are about the only feature absent from most other free backlink checkers. And there's lots of it at SEMrush. They include over a dozen tables and graphs that summarise 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.
Best for 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.
One of the drawbacks of free SEO tools is that you may have to give up some convenience. In the case of backlink checkers, this could imply combining a variety of tools to meet all of your backlink research requirements.
The majority of your needs will be met using a combination of SEO SpyGlass and Google Search Console from the link checker tools described in this post. The statistics in SEO SpyGlass can be utilized to compensate for the absence of metrics in Search Console, and the data from Search Console can be used to get around SEO SpyGlass's backlink limit. These two together form a good foundation for tracking and controlling your own backlink profile, as well as spying on your competitors.
Aside from that, Seobility and Ahrefs' free editions can be utilized for quick but limited backlink extraction, while SEMrush's free version can provide much-needed analytics and statistics. These three tools work together to let you spy on your competition and learn about their backlink methods.
