Backlinks define the authority of your website and are therefore one of the most important factors in search ranking. In addition, backlink SEO can be the key element to beating your competitors – you can do your best in technical, on-page and content SEO, you can pick top keywords, but you will still fall behind if your backlink profile also falls behind. With this in mind, it is clear that backlink optimization requires a lot of attention.
To properly optimize your backlinks, you need a good backlink tool. What Makes a Good Backlink Tool? It should be able to check your backlink profile, discover new link building opportunities, and ideally, be as good as free. Fortunately, the latter is easy to solve – the tools we’re looking at today are all available for free. Read, analyze and choose what best suits your company.
A 100% free online tool with a large volume of data, backlink audit functionality, historical records and opportunities for competitive research.
Online Backlink Checker is a 100% free tool for comprehensive backlink checks, supported by the SEO PowerSuite Crawler.
The tool does not require any preparatory work such as complicated logins, passwords, downloads or proof of ownership to start working with a website. Just open the tool, log in with an email or Facebook (free), enter the domain – and see how many backlinks a website has, which domains they come from and how the number of backlinks has changed Changed over time has been helpful for monitoring backlink health. You can also see how many dofollow and nofollow backlinks a website has, discover anchor texts, and see the rank of the linking page.
The tool shows you up to 10,000 backlinks and the number of checks and the number of domains is unlimited. This means you can check all of your competitors’ websites to see how their backlink profile changes over time. And of course, borrow some of their backlink prospects.
With the online backlink checker you can sort backlinks according to different factors, such as:
- Domain rank;
- Side rank;
- dofollow / nofollow;
- Last find date.
This will help you find the most valuable backlink prospects that can improve your ranking and beat your competitors in SERP.
Online Backlink Checker is a web-based platform that does not require any additional storage space on your device. All you need is a domain and that’s it. Literally. So easy.
Suitable for: Online Backlink Checker is a perfect tool for regular backlink audits and competitor research for companies of all sizes.
Free data volume: up to 10,000 backlinks per domain, unlimited domains, unlimited number of checks, unlimited data volume.
A free backlink tool with a large volume of data, but with somewhat limited options for in-depth backlink analysis and competitor research.
The Google Search Console is a Google tool that webmasters and website owners can use to check their websites.
The tool is completely free, so it’s a great choice if you are on a budget. However, GSC can only be used to review your own websites, meaning you must verify your ownership and not be able to review your competitors’ websites.
Once you connect your website to the Google Search Console, you get access to a variety of useful reports and metrics, including a backlink report. The report includes the list of your most frequently linked pages, the websites these backlinks came from, and the most popular anchor texts. The results are taken directly from the Google index.
The special thing about the Search Console is that you are not shown the backlink pages themselves, but only the domains from which they originate. The results you can see in the tool are limited to the top 1000 links and no additional metrics like dofollow / nofollow, domain authority, history records, etc. are available.
Another feature of GSC is that it reports fewer backlinks than any other backlink checker. This is because the tool removes poor quality backlinks from the report and only shows those that Google believes are significant. So you cannot use GSC to discover and remove toxic backlinks. In addition, the Search Console does not display backlinks that have been indexed by other search engines.
Best for: The Google Search Console is a tool used by website owners and webmasters to review their websites. It can be used to do a basic backlink audit, but you will need a number of additional tools with larger data for deeper analysis.
Free data volume: up to 1,000 results per report; the data is only available for your website.
A free online backlink checker tool with massive data and unlimited domains to check.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker is a free tool that takes data from one of the largest indexes on the Internet. You can check as many domains as you need, but the results you can see for free are limited to the top 100 backlinks.
In addition to the backlinks themselves, the tool shows you the general domain authority of your website, anchor texts as well as the monthly organic traffic and the authority of a referring page. The tool also shows you the percentage of dofollow backlinks, but doesn’t tell you which links are dofollow exactly.
Since the number of checks is unlimited, you can use the tool for backlink competition research.
Best For: Ahrefs Backlink Checker can be used to quickly check your website’s backlink profile or get insights into the profiles of your competitors. We recommend using this tool in conjunction with another data source as the data available for free in Ahrefs doesn’t really reflect the full backlink profile.
Free data volume: 100 backlinks per exam, unlimited exams, unlimited domains.
A backlink checking tool for quickly checking your backlink profiles or those of your competitors.
Seobility offers a pretty good set of metrics for evaluating backlinks and showing the brief summary of your domain’s backlink profile.
The tool shows referring domains, linked pages, anchor texts, whether a link is dofollow and how high its rating is. Although the pages that link to your website will not appear. The referring domains are sorted by rank from highest to lowest, so you get the list of the most valuable domains as soon as you start the check.
The number of daily checks is limited to three, which drastically limits the possibilities of competitive research and can be even more annoying if you accidentally close the tool tab in your browser. Also, the number of linking domains you can view per exam is limited to 400, which may not be enough (not enough in most cases).
Suitable for: Seobility is good for a quick look at your competitor’s backlink profile. It’s not the best tool for regular backlink audits due to the limited daily reviews, but it can be used after Ahrefs to find backlinks that Ahrefs failed.
Free data volume: 3 checks daily, 400 backlinks per check.
A popular tool for link audits, but very few results are available for free.
MOZ Link Explorer provides a brief report on historical backlink data such as new and lost backlinks, domain authority statistics, percentage of dofollow backlinks, list of most popular anchors, top linking domains, and list of most popular backlinks.
To view the data, you need to create a MOZ account and enter the domain you want to verify.
In terms of competitive research, you’re limited to 10 free reviews per month, so we recommend using this tool along with a few others. Choose the tools that have unlimited audits.
In terms of backlinks, the tool shows the top 50 tracked backlinks. It’s a good start, but not enough data for in-depth research. And there aren’t any filtering or sorting options to show a different set of backlinks so stick with those 50. On the flip side, you have the option to export these top 50 backlinks to CSV if you need to.
Best for: MOZ Link Explorer can be used for regular backlink checks if your business is relatively small. In terms of in-depth analysis and competitive research, it is better to use this tool in combination with, for example, Online Backlink Checker or Ahrefs.
Free data volume: 10 checks per month, up to 50 backlinks, up to 10 anchor texts, up to 10 linked domains.
Summarize something
By default, free SEO tools are less resourceful than their paid versions, and backlink checkers are no exception. Plus (actually minus) you cannot save your results. How can you make the most of it? Use a combination of tools – it doesn’t take much time, but it gives you more complete analytics for in-depth research.
It would be advisable to combine the online backlink checker and the Google Search Console for more data. It is also a good solution to use a desktop SEO SpyGlass tool (an advanced version of Online Backlink Checker) that can be connected to Search Console through Settings. So you have all the data in one tool, which is obviously more convenient for managing and monitoring your backlinks as well as for competitor research.
The free backlink checkers from Ahrefs, Seobility and MOZ help you with a quick backlink analysis. These tools can also be used if your website is small and you don’t have a lot of backlinks.
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