How to Monitor Backlinks (Plus Best Backlink Monitoring Tools)

Backlink monitoring is one of the most important parts of link-building and SEO strategy, and as a webmaster, it’s important for us to keep track of our backlinks. For example, let’s say you’ve successfully run an outreach campaign and secured high-quality links that were then indexed by Google.

But, over time, those links may be removed or lost for different reasons. Once the backlinks are removed, the ranking of your keywords starts dropping, and your website starts to lose traffic.

What’s more, if you don’t monitor your backlinks, you won’t be able to know about these link losses in the first place. And if you don’t know about them, then you can’t take any action to recover the lost links.

This is why backlink monitoring is so important.

Now, there are different ways to monitor your backlinks. You can do it manually, or you can use some sort of backlink monitoring tool.

But if you’re doing it manually, then it could be a tedious and time-consuming process. You need to check all your links one by one to see if they’re still there or not. And if you have a lot of links, then this process can take hours or even days.

Now, back to the guide…

If you’re serious about your link-building and SEO strategy, then backlink monitoring is a must. For this, you need to continue reading and find out the best backlink monitoring tools that are currently available.

But before we do that, let’s first talk about why it’s so important in detail.

Why Do You Need to Monitor Your Backlinks?

As we have already discussed, backlink monitoring is important because it allows you to keep an eye on all of your links and make sure you take the appropriate steps to re-acquire them if any of them are lost.

Here we have outlined some important reasons why it is a good idea to monitor your backlinks;

• Helps you track your link-building progress: By keeping track of your backlinks, you can see which links are working and which ones are not. This information can then be used to improve your link-building strategy.
• Allows you to take action if any of your links are removed: If you’re not monitoring your backlinks, then you won’t even know if any of them have been removed. And if you don’t take action, then your rankings will start to drop.
• Helps in making your link-building strategy more effective: By monitoring your backlinks, you can see what’s working and what’s not. This information can then be used to make your link-building strategy more effective.
• More traffic and better rankings: By taking action on lost backlinks and improving your link-building strategy, you can get more traffic and better rankings.

Now that we have talked about the importance of backlink monitoring, let’s take a look at some of the best backlink monitoring tools that are currently available.

The 9 Best Backlink Monitoring Tools

Finding the right backlink monitoring tool can be a bit of a challenge as there are so many options available that it can be tough to know which one to choose.

But to help you out, we have put together a list of the best backlink monitoring tools available. And we’re definitely sure these tools help you keep track of your backlinks and your competitors.

These tools are;

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs, one of the most renowned SEO tools available in the market, was founded in 2010 by Dmitry Gerasimenko and is used by a variety of companies, including Netflix, LinkedIn, Uber, Pinterest, and Facebook, just to name a few.

And if you’re looking for a backlink monitoring tool, then Ahrefs is definitely worth checking out. Ahrefs’ backlink checker tool is one of the best in the business and allows you to keep track of your backlinks as well as your competitors’.

Ahrefs lets you to

• Get domain and page-level metrics for any domain or page
• Take a look at any website, URL, or subsection to learn how SEO can be improved
• Observe how backlink profiles are growing and declining
• View the target’s complete backlink profile
• Find out how much organic traffic each linking page and referring domain is receiving.
• Identify all websites linking to your target using domain-wide metrics

Ahrefs provides a detailed analysis that will help you improve your site’s performance. Ahrefs prices their services at $99 to $999 monthly, based on the special features required. Similarly, the annual plans are priced in the range of $83/mo to $833/mo on annual billing.

2. SEMrush

Anybody who is in the SEO business will know the name of this tool. SEMrush is a widely used tool for both the value it provides and its simple user Interface. By analyzing your site with SEMrush, you can clearly identify the areas where your site lags and improve them.

Semrush is proven to have the largest and best backlink database. A quick analysis of the backlinks on the web can be conducted using this massive backlink database.

With the SEMrush tool, you will be able to do

• Track and monitor the backlinks of your domain
• Filter backlinks and breakdown backlinks by type
• Get informed when backlinks are deleted
• Find when new backlinks are created
• Do a deep analysis of all your backlinks

And much more.

At $119.95/mo, SEMrush provides you with more than 55 tools to help you with your site’s SEO. You also get a 30-day free trial using our exclusive semrush free trial offer, and you can use its features and decide for yourself if it fits your requirement.

3. Linkody

Linkody lets you analyze your profile, your competitor’s profile, and any other profile completely for backlinks and provides you with all the data you require. Its friendly user interface and easy-to-understand database allow even someone who doesn’t have the technical knowledge to use this tool with ease.

It is not just a simple tool just to monitor your backlinks. A few of the amazing features this tool offers are:

• Multiple users under the same accounts
• Landing page monitor for 404 error
• Moz metrics which give you Moz Rank, Domain Authority, Page Authority, Spam Score
• Connect Linkody with Google Analytics and Ahrefs
• One click to find the link on the source page
• Email notifications etc

You can get a complete view of your website’s backlink profile with his tool and export the reports as PDF or CSV files to compare with your competitors.

Linkody comes at monthly and yearly pricing along with a 30-day free trial. The price ranges from $14.90 per month for 2 domains and users. And in case you want to go for a yearly plan, it starts from $11.20 per month, billed yearly. You also get 3 months for free if you choose the yearly plan.

4. Monitor Backlinks

As the name suggests, this is a reliable tool for monitoring your backlinks. Checking and monitoring the backlinks of your website, as well as the websites of your competitors, and helping you to build good links is probably one of the best features of this tool.

This tool helps you grow traffic and monitor backlinks to your website in a simple 7-step process.

• Finding high-quality sites to build backlinks
• Alerting you when new links are created so as to develop new relationships
• Letting you know when a backlink is removed
• Monitoring and tracking your progress over time
• Assess your competitor’s strategies and implement them with improvements
• Efficiently disavowing bad Links
• Integrate Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, and Google Webmaster Tools backlink data into one place

It also has a keyword rank tracking feature which helps you improve your site’s content that ultimately helps you to improve your site’s SEO rankings. Monitor backlinks plan starts at $25 per month with a 30-day free trial.

5. Majestic

Hands down, this is one of the websites that provides you with a complete toolset that includes many advantageous features specially designed to improve your backlinks. Majestic focuses completely on building authoritative backlinks and making your site an authentic one.

Majestic helps you to;

• Track backlinks with customized campaigns
• View the top backlinks of every site
• Download the best links of any website in Excel, CSV, and TSV formats
• Filter by topic, quality, language, and a range of industry-standard metrics
• Measure the performance of websites and URLs based on top-level metrics, etc.

Claiming to be the world’s best backlink checker, Majestic has been in this business since 2004. And so, they have introduced many new metrics, like, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Visibility Flow, Topical Trust Flow, Flow Metric Scores, etc., by which you can assess your site’s performance.

They offer monthly and yearly plans which start at $49.99 and $41.67.

Respectively. They are further divided into three packages – Lite, Pro, and API.

6. Linkio

Linkio is one of the best monitorbacklink alternatives with some of the most simple off-page SEO tools; linkio helps you to Check Your Backlinks Status, SEO Metrics, Indexed Status, and Monitor Uptime and Changes.

Linkio gives you a great experience by

• Automatically get the status, dofollow or nofollow, anchor text, title tag, and surrounding text of your backlinks.
• Check The Popular Metrics Automatically
• Periodical checking of Indexed backlinks
• Notifies any changes in the backlinks
• Easily export your backlinks from Google Search Console and import them into Linkio.
• Visualize Your SEO Progress with easily understandable charts

Daily updates about your backlinks and SEO progress are given to you so that you can make the necessary changes to your site. This is the most affordable monitoring tool, with the price starting at $19.99 per month in case of monthly billing and $16.66 per month when billed annually.

So if you’re looking for monitor backlinks alternative, you must try this tool!

7. Link Explorer by Moz

A boon to all marketing agencies is the Link explorer by Moz. From competitor analysis to checking broken backlinks, this tool offers you a wide variety of options and advantages. Not only for backlinks, but you can also use Link explorer by Moz for;

• Reviewing and monitoring inbound links
• Compare the makeup of your competitors’ link profiles and see where they’re earning their links and how.
• Maintain link equity and traffic from the quality backlinks you’ve earned by easily finding and fixing broken links to your site.
• Decrease the number of spammy links pointing to your site and increase the quality of backlinks.
• Find out who’s linking to your competitors
• Research top-performing content
• Monitor when your content is gaining or losing links. Discover the most recent links by date.
• Analyze anchor text
• Check success metrics, including Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), Spam Score, and complete link counts to any site.

Moreover, they also offer free SEO tools, Competitive Research, Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer, Domain Analysis, etc.  Although the free tools offer everything you need, with the MOZ Pro, which starts at $99 per month, you get an expert who will help you with your site’s SEO and take care of things for you 24/7.

8. SE Ranking

SE ranking is a full-package SEO tool with a backlink checker and tracking tool. Keeping an eye on your backlinks has now been made easy with SE ranking.

All you have to do is manually add your backlinks to the tool or from Google Search Console. The tool takes care of the regular checkups automatically and notifies you in case of any changes.

This tool has three types of plans – One month, three months, 6 months, 9 months, and annual plan. The plan can also be customized on the basis of the frequency of checks. You can save more by selecting an annual plan which starts at $18.72 with weekly checking frequency.

9. Mention

This is not exactly a backlink monitoring tool – but this is a tool that will allow your brand to grow exponentially by letting you know what is in the trend and who is talking about you. Mention monitors all kinds of sources like press releases, forums, and blogs.

In case you want to grow your online presence and stay at the top of the trend, this is your go-to trend. With this tool, you can

• Create alerts for anything related to your business
• Monitor who is tagging you or mentioning you anywhere on the internet
• Publish relevant content as per your content strategy with the help of a content calendar

This is an all-in-one tool for all your online presence needs. From research to planning and publishing, Mention helps you from the start till the end!

The great thing is that there is a free plan for all those who want to test the waters. Mention allows you to use the tool for free with limited features. The paid subscription opens up all the features at the price of €29 per month in monthly billing and €24 in annual billing.

Best Backlink Monitoring Tool Depends on Your Needs

Even though the tools do all the work for you, there are certain things that you need to do from your side to improve your site’s SEO ranking.

Having a consistent habit of checking and updating your backlinks is the most important of them. So here are a few tips that will make the task easy for you in monitoring and tracking backlinks of your website.

1. Manage a Google Sheet for Monitoring Backlinks

There are already a lot of easy-to-use options available in the market. But if you are looking for something with all the pro features without even spending any amount, then Google Sheets is gonna be the best DIY backlink monitoring hack for you. Google already provides you with a magical tool known as Google Analytics. You have access to all the useful information related to backlinks there, like date, full URL, referring domain, and much more.

So you have to start by collecting data from Google Analytics. To do so, you simply need to follow the basic steps:

• Sign into your Google Analytics account
• Go to the backlink section and then apply the necessary filters as per your result requirement.
• Click on apply, and you will get all the required data.

Moving further, you need to take this data in your Google sheet using an API. Google Analytics provides you with a free API that you can use to access all the data that you have using the web interface.

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2. Track and Disavow Suspicious or Bad Backlinks

The worst thing you can do to throw all your hard work behind SEO into a trash bag is to build suspicious backlinks with no healthy purpose. These suspicious backlinks seem spam to Google and can trigger search engines.

However, sometimes your competitors use this nasty technique to bring down the ranking of your site. So you can avoid this by keeping track and removing those toxic links at regular intervals.

Follow the below 4 golden principles taught by SEO professionals to keep your site healthy and away from toxic links.

• Use Google’s disavow link option – Google provides simple tools that can help you to disavow all spammy links. After you’re done with your research, and you know the links that you want to avoid, prepare a text file and upload it to Google’s Disavow link tool. Google will take time to put it into action, and your rankings will revive.
• Tracking and picking up the toxic links to disavow – As per Google instructions, any link from any site that is not directly related to the topic of your website is toxic or has a bad backlink. This contains links from any personal website, bad or illegal websites, websites with language other than your content, and too many links from the same site.
• Using a tool to find the location of the bad backlinks – Tools like Moz, Semrush, and Ahrefs are highly effective when it comes to tracking these spammy backlinks and gathering enough information for you to remove them.
• Try to ask for the removal – of wallpaper, you don’t recommend this method as the chances are near 20, but you can try to get the contact details of the website and ask them to remove these spammy links if you don’t find the contact then it’s better to contact the hosting provider for help.

3. Add Habit to Weekly Check the Status of Your Core Backlinks

Well, backlinking and SEO is a constant process as it keeps changing regularly, and you have to make sure you are not missing out on regular tracking. A weekly status-checking habit will not only improve your data analysis but even gather all the updated information for any SEO improvement. A week is enough for spammy backlinks to overload and hurt your SEO.

Once you have correctly set up the link tracking system, you can either schedule the weekly checking or manually check it each week. The automation process works better; even if the system is automated, you should still take some time to review the reports. So the best thing is to add this to your To-Do list and set up a notification system that will prevent you from missing out any week.

4. Always Measure the Impact of SERP Changes

Search engines are constantly evolving to provide their visitors with the best user experience and relevant information. This constant change in this search engine can positively and negatively impact your website. Over the years, the rankings have been negatively impacted by changes even though you aren’t using any black SEO hacks.

Whenever any search engine that you are targeting launches and updates, make sure to go through the documents carefully and understand the required changes. This will save your side from any major backlash that may happen.

After making the necessary changes, start tracking the impact of these updates on your website by utilizing Webmaster and other SEO tools. The important data that you need to focus on is the number of visitors, ranking, backlinks, any crashes, and bugs.

5. Always Monitor the Backlinks of Your Competitors

Competitive research is one of those success keys that gives you the maximum outcome in a short time. If your competitors are ranking higher than you, then start looking for the sources from where they are getting the maximum benefits. Dig deeper into their website SEO strategies, like which sites are providing them with quality backlinks.

Try contacting the owners and building good connections with them as you may end up getting a backlink from them.

Now make sure you aren’t portraying yourself as an envious person trying to steal others’ strategies while building connections. Maintain ethical practices.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Even though the article clearly explains all the details, here are some FAQs that will help you get clarity regarding the topic.

Q. Why are monitoring backlinks important?

Effective and efficient monitoring of backlinks is important to know if your site is ranking properly in Google searches.

Monitoring backlinks helps you to manage backlinks so that your site’s authority increases. It is important to monitor backlinks to add good links and remove bad links.

Q. How can I check my backlink status manually?

You can use the free and simple tool Google Analytics to check your backlinks manually. You can sign in and create an account with Google Analytics. Once done, you can assess the backlinks under the “Backlinks” section.

We have given you a free Google Sheets Template, which you can use to track your backlinks manually.

Q. How to check for bad backlinks?

All the tools mentioned in this article automatically detect and alert you in case of bad backlinks. You can then choose to remove them; if you want to do it manually,  You can check for bad backlinks by conducting a manual Google search. But it will take a lot of your time and effort.

Wrapping Up!

Overall, there are many best alternative tools that you can find to monitor backlinks. Each of them slightly differs from others based on their unique features. It is your decision as to which tool fits your best needs.

The important things to consider before subscribing to any tool are the cost, the plans it offers, and the extra features that come with the subscription. Once you do thorough research, you will find which tool suits you the best. And yes, although you can check your backlinks manually, it is always easy to have a tool that helps you analyze and monitor your backlinks, as it saves you a lot of time.

If you need any kind of assistance regarding monitoring backlinks, we are just one comment away!