SEO efforts are all about building backlinks, which are crucial for search engine optimization. They are one of the top ranking factors and help you rank higher in search engines like Google. In this guide, we’ll explore how to check for backlinks and analyze and monitor the backlink profile.
How to Spot Your Backlinks on Google – Discover easy steps to check your backlink profile directly using Google Search Console and other handy tools.
Why Backlink Analysis Matters – Learn how analyzing your backlinks can boost your SEO efforts, improve rankings, and keep your site healthy.
Top Tools for Backlink Checking – Get to know the best tools to monitor and evaluate your backlinks, ensuring you’re always ahead of the competition.
How do Backlinks Help in Link Building?
Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are links originating from external websites that link to your website. Search engine crawlers use these links to assess the significance and relevance of web pages.
Understanding the traffic and popularity of the linking website can provide valuable insights into your site’s potential ranking and relevance in search results.
The greater the number of authoritative websites linking to your site, the better it is for your backlink portfolio. That’s why Google considers this as a key factor in determining the relevance of search results, ultimately enhancing the user experience.
Getting backlinks can get you referral traffic, improve search rankings, and establish you as an authority in your field.
No. Because not all backlinks hold the same weight. Quality is always better than quantity. Some can be spammy, while others can be from high-authority sites.
Some can be no-follows, while others are do-follows. Hence, it’s important to regularly monitor your backlink portfolio and analyze the quality and relevance of your backlinks to maintain relevance in the eyes of Google.
Wondering how long it takes for backlinks to show up after you’ve built them? Don’t worry, it’s a common question, and we’ve got the answers for you here.
The Importance of Backlink Analysis
A backlink audit is a blueprint of your SEO efforts. It gives you insights into your backlink portfolio and your competitors, tells you where your competitor recent mobile phone number list is getting backlinks from, and helps you find gaps to fill.
One of the main reasons to do a backlink audit is to find room for improvement and get ideas from your competitors’ backlink portfolios.
Plus, analyzing your competitors’ profiles can help you understand the quality of their referring domains, nofollow and dofollow ratio, anchor text placement, and more.
Analyzing Your Backlink Profile for SEO
Backlink portfolios help you build backlinks to organically rank well in Google SERPs. You can analyze what worked in the past to repeat the process and gain more backlinks.
For example, if you notice many of your backlinks are directed to case studies you’ve produced, it suggests that case studies are highly regarded and sought-after content within your industry.
Hence, it’s a good idea to focus on generating more case studies to capitalize on their effectiveness.
Since it helps to find valuable link opportunities, remove toxic links and ultimately improve rankings, any SEO expert should regularly do backlink audits, as it is one of the most impactful methods for enhancing organic search traffic.
We’ll explore this in more detail in the following sections.
Backlink Checker Tools
There are many tools to help you analyze your backlink portfolio.
Google Search Console (GSC)
Google Search Console is the best place to start since it’s a free tool. Once you make an account, you’re good to go.
GSC enables you to monitor and maintain your website’s visibility in search results. It allows you to see whether Google can effectively crawl your site, understand your website’s content, and appropriately rank your pages in Google search results.
You can also use Google Search Console to find and resolve indexing issues that may hinder other sites from discovering and linking to your page.
However, you won’t be able to see the anchor texts or properties of a link, such as dofollow or nofollow.
To be able to see your top linking sites:
The report provides insight into the top websites that are linking to your site.
For each of these sites, you’ll find details on the number of linking pages and target pages. ‘Linking Pages’ indicates how many of their pages are linking back to yours, while ‘Target Pages’ shows the number of web pages they are linking to.
You can also click on each separate web page to find the links it has and how many times each link appears.
To filter out the top linked pages,
As seen in the image above, inbound links show you pages that have the highest number of backlinks.
If you want to know which pages are getting the most links from different websites, try sorting by ‘Linking Sites’.
These links come from various unique websites. Plus, just like before, when you click on a web page, you’ll be able to see the top sites linking to it and the number of backlinks each site has.
If you want to go over these later, you can download it.
However, I found some limitations in the quality of data I got from GSC. For example, they only display the top 1000 pages linking to you, no more. So, if you have a page that’s older or has too many backlinks, you may need another tool for analysis.
Note: ‘Top’ in ‘top linking sites’ metrics refers to the number of times a site links to you, not the quality of the site.
Within seconds, you can analyze multiple competitor websites simultaneously and check who is linking to them.
Go to SEMrush, and in the dashboard, under ‘Link Building,’ click on ‘Backlink Analytics.” Add a domain name of your choice, and then click on ‘Analyze.’
First, you’ll see all the links related to that area. If you want to examine each link more closely, go to the ‘Backlinks’ section for more details.
Do All Website Backlinks Count?
Here, you can examine the particular backlinks. It shows its quality on a scale of 0 to 100. Plus, you can see the anchor text used for the links.
This backlinks report helps you analyze the relevance and frequency of links and understand if they’re dofollow or nofollow links. As we all know 5 ways to analyze the target audience – webpromoexperts blog different links have different values.
For example, if you’re in the health and fitness industry, links from trustworthy sites like WebMD, Healthline, or Men’s Health hold more value than links from unrelated sites.
SEO Backlinks meme
It’s important to track the quality and relevance of the linking domains because Google considers these metrics while evaluating your backlinks.
You can arrange these links based on authority score, link status, and what type of link they are (dofollow or nofollow).
You can also filter out links based on the metrics you want to evaluate, such as the type of link, placement, language, etc.
The ‘Indexed Pages’ tab lets you see which page of yours is most linked to.
Analyzing these pages can show you what type of content gets the most links on your site. It can also give you insights on how to improve your own content to get more links in the future.
Ahrefs Site Explorer
Ahrefs has the largest index of live backlinks. This tool tells you about the number of backlinks and referring domains for any site.
Go to Site Explorer, type in the website, subfolder, or webpage you want to explore, and then choose ‘Overview’ mode.
Then, go to ‘Site Explorer’ and select ‘Referring Domains’
Like GSC, Ahrefs provides information on the referring domains and a number of links. However, Ahrefs also provides information on Domain Rating (shown as DR), nofollow and do follow links, and estimated organic traffic for each referring domain.
Visit the ‘Backlinks Report’ to obtain an extensive report on all the backlinks. Go to ‘Site Explorer,’ then select ‘Backlinks.’
The best part about this tool is that it allows you to monitor your backlink portfolio.
With Ahrefs, you can track how your backlinks change over time, tracking both increases and decreases, along with monitoring the organic traffic to each page.
Ahrefs also provides insights into which pages are most successful by highlighting their most linked-to pages.
Moz Link Explorer
Moz Link Explorer gives you important insights to help you create stronger backlinks for your business. Go to Moz and Navigate to the ‘Link Explorer’.
Type in a website in the search bar to get details about the links pointing to that site. You’ll find information on incoming links, anchor text, the authority of the linking page, and its spam score.
Another advantage of backlink auditing is being able to examine your competitor’s link profile.
Tip: To reduce domain name errors usb directory while analyzing your competitors’ profiles, I suggest using copy-and-paste instead of manually typing.
After entering a competitor domain, go to the inbound links tab to find the sources of the links and their value.
Adjust the settings as follows: Link type—Follow, Links Status—Active. This way, you’ll see all the outside links boosting your competitor’s site’s link value.
In Link Explorer, you can usually save reports as .csv files. Save these results and do the same for your competitors’ reports.