A good backlink profile can do wonders for your SEO, boosting your domain authority and driving tons of traffic to your website. But the keyword there is good because backlinks can just as easily ruin your reputation as they can improve it. This is why monitoring your backlink profile is important – it gives you an overview of the kind of links you’re getting and an idea of what those links are doing for you. If you’re actively pursuing a link-building strategy, however, your number of backlinks is probably in the dozens if not hundreds already. Manually checking each of those links would be next to impossible. Luckily, there are a few tools that help you monitor your link profile.
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Why Is Monitoring Your Backlink Profile Important?
When it comes to backlinks, quality is more important than quantity. So simply getting a lot of backlinks isn’t the key – getting quality backlinks is. A quality backlink will typically come from a website with more domain authority than you, with lots of traffic, and in a similar niche as yours. But not all backlinks you receive, especially not those that come spontaneously, will be like that. And besides, things change quickly in SEO; what was once a good backlink may start dragging you down if the website loses authority or changes in some way.
Poor backlinks can be disastrous for SEO. It’s much better to remove them from your portfolio, even if it means having fewer backlinks overall. This is why it is important to keep track of your backlinks – know where they’re coming from and what they’re doing for your SEO so that you can react if there’s a problem.
The Best Tools For Monitoring Your Backlink Profile
When you only have a few backlinks, checking them manually is not a problem. But as your profile grows, it becomes impossible to follow up on every link. One of the worst SEO mistakes you can make at this stage is thinking that you can do it all by yourself. Instead, use one of these tools to help you out:
Ahrefs:
An excellent tool for researching your niche and monitoring your competition, Ahrefs also offers invaluable insights about backlinks. It is arguably one of the most active web crawlers on the Internet (second only to Google itself) as it crawls 4.1 million pages per minute. Not only will it most certainly find all your backlinks, but it’ll also give you an excellent analysis of them. Among the things you can learn about your backlink profile is the percentage of dofollow and nofollow links, which anchor text was used, and even why certain backlinks disappeared. It is a tool well worth having, even at a minimum of $99/month.
SEMrush:
Designed to help you develop the best possible content marketing strategy, SEMrush is a popular tool among SEO experts. It will give you a good analysis of backlinks for both your website and your competition. Its link audits include information about:
- the number of backlinks you have,
- the ratio of dofollow/nofollow links,
- whether the links are helping your DA or not,
- the geo-location of the websites providing you with backlinks, and more.
By conducting the same analysis on your competition, you can also learn what others are doing and follow in their footsteps.
Linkody:
If you’re looking to save money on marketing tools, then Linkody is the perfect backlink monitoring tool for you. Free, fully automated, and with an easy interface, it’s perfect for beginners. But with features such as 24/7 monitoring, notifications of gained or lost backlinks, and competitor analysis, it can be very helpful for anyone looking for insights into their backlink profile. You can check the DA of the linking site, whether links are dofollow or nofollow, and which links might be spam. The premium version will come with additional features for your social media too!
Moz Link Explorer:
A favourite among marketing professionals, Link Explorer is an excellent tool for building a strong backlink profile. With it, you can:
- keep track of all your backlinks,
- find out which domains link to you,
- check the domain authority of different source websites,
- compare your link-building strategy to your competitors, and more.
Given that the tool is developed by Moz, which stands behind DA as well, you can count on it to be powerful and reliable.
Monitor Backlinks:
A rising star, Monitor Backlinks is an easy and affordable way to analyze your backlinks. It provides an overview of domains, SEO metrics, keyword rankings, and anchor text reports. With this information, you can easily separate the good from the bad. When you do find backlinks that aren’t helping you increase website traffic and might even incur a penalty, you can easily disavow them with this tool. Finally, Monitor Backlinks will help you improve your link-building strategy; not only can you analyze your competitors’ profiles with it, but it’ll also give you suggestions of good websites to reach out to for backlink hosting.
Steps To Take In Addition To Monitoring Your Backlink Profile:
Monitoring your backlink profile is an excellent way to keep track of your website’s online presence. But it’s just one part of a link-building strategy. You should never stop working on improving your backlink profile. Reaching out to high-profile websites is a must; just make sure you have a good pitch first. Remember to diversify – too many backlinks from the same domain are suspicious. Finally, consider monitoring your mentions as well. When people mention your brand by name without linking back to your website, use this opportunity. Contact them and ask them to turn that mention into a backlink – it’ll help you grow your backlink portfolio!
About the Author:Alexandra Daniels is a digital marketing expert at Link Department who specializes in strengthening the online presence of small businesses. Backlinks are at the core of her strategy – she believes their importance cannot be overstated. That is why she often shares her passion for link-building in blog posts and easy-to-digest articles that she hopes will help small business owners get their websites on the right track.
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