Backlink Checker With Historical and New/Lost Link Data
You will know that backlinks are vital for rankings. Our Backlink Checker is easy to use and it will give you insights into who is linking back to your competition and the benefits they are getting through a comprehensive backlink analysis tool, allowing you to understand competitors' backlink profiles better. This allows you to focus on obtaining the key backlinks that will help you outrank your rivals. You can even steal backlinks with our exclusive lost link data.
Google and other search engines track these votes, and websites that get the most are listed higher in searches related to their content.
The effectiveness of backlinks is also helped by the fact that they require very little extra effort to accrue. If a website is posting quality, relevant content, then other websites will want to backlink to them as a way to raise their authority.
Let’s say you do search for ‘news’ on Google. There are thousands of news websites, with more opening every day. But you will always see the same few websites appearing at the top of the search ranking.
This is because these websites are known to be high-quality and high-authority. One of the main ways to achieve this authority is by collecting relevant backlinks.
Your main competitor’s website will likely have a lot of organic backlinks. Smaller websites want to link to an authoritative website because it makes them look better and more trusted.
In this way, backlinks are a two-way relationship; when used correctly, backlinks will help to cement the linked websites’ place in search rankings and help to build the smaller websites’ reputation as credible sources of information.
To compete on the same level as these authoritative websites, you’ll want to emulate their backlinks…but, it’s impossible and unfeasible to track all of the backlinks that competitors receive manually.
This is where a backlink checker tool becomes essential. A backlink checker tool will automate the process of finding key competitor website backlinks, let you track websites to be notified of new backlinks, and more features; for example, see what percentage of these links are dofollow links.
The best backlink checkers will also have historical data and lost link data. Historical data will allow you to see the backlinks that a website had in the past, but has removed.
This is a key contextual tool that will help you to identify backlinks that your competitors have deemed to be low quality and help you to avoid generating these kinds of backlinks.
Lost link data will allow you to see where a website had a backlink, but the link is no longer accessible. This presents an opportunity for you, as it means that you can tailor content towards this backlink. Additionally, the availability of a free backlink checker tool as part of our suite enhances your ability to conduct thorough backlink analysis without any initial investment.
When the website goes to fix this lost link, they will see relevant content on your site and will use this in place of the old backlink from your competitor’s website. That’s an easy win for you and your search metrics.
If you’ve been neglecting to research your competitors’ backlinks, then now is the time to start. Effective use of a backlink checker tool will allow you to analyze where and why your competitors are succeeding at an intimate level.
Backlink Checker Overview
A backlink checker is most commonly applied to your own website. You can, and should, use a backlink checker to monitor websites that link to you.
The main benefit of monitoring these backlinks is that you can identify low-quality backlinks and remove these quickly and effectively. This is crucial for maintaining backlink quality, which directly impacts your site's authority and search rankings. Additionally, understanding the role of external backlinks is essential in enhancing site authority and rankings through links from reputable sources.
This is important because allowing disreputable sites to backlink to your site will make you lose authority, lose relevance in search rankings, and in the worst of scenarios have your website penalized.
Backlink checkers keep a comprehensive index of websites and can identify backlinks within these websites’ content. It’s important to choose a backlink tracker that has a comprehensive index, else you won’t be getting an accurate picture of the backlinks that your website has gained.
Another critical use case for a backlink checker involves using it as a competitor analysis tool. Competitor analysis is, of course, critical to building a brand and a reputation for your website. A key aspect of this analysis includes understanding the number and quality of referring domains, which can reveal untapped opportunities and areas for improvement in your own backlink strategy.
A backlink checker will help you to achieve this by showing you essential information about the backlinks your competitors are receiving, and more importantly how they are responding to these backlinks.
Backlink checkers will vary in the amount of detail that they provide. Most will give you basic information, and then it is up to you how you interpret this.
However, the more time-efficient and cost-efficient move is to invest in an advanced backlink checker with features such as historical data and new/lost link checking. You can also find backlink checkers that come as part of a larger suite of SEO tools.
In this case, the backlink checker is designed to have flawless integration with these other tools, allowing you to streamline your SEO research and workflow.
What Is A Backlink Checker?
Let’s break down what a backlink checker is on a technical level. To begin with, we need to understand how websites are cataloged on the internet.
Every website that is live right now, or has ever been live on the world wide web, is indexed. This means that a copy of the site is stored on a server, and this index will be periodically updated to give you the most accurate version of that website.
Indexing websites has several uses. First of all, an index acts as an archive. Some indexes, such as archive.org, index websites to preserve their information.
This is useful if the website is taken down years later, or somehow changed and old information that the website held needs to be retrieved. More commonly, an index is used to allow search engines to retrieve the website faster and more accurately.
At face value, a search engine might just seem like a tool that looks for websites that contain the keywords you input. This is something that most search engines can do, but the process of retrieving search results goes deeper than this.
Search engines such as Google have their reputation tracker for each website that it indexes. Through this, Google can determine which websites are trustworthy, and which are not. The high-quality websites will rise to the top of search rankings, as Google believes that these websites are the ones that users want to see. In assessing a site's authoritativeness, 'domain authority' plays a crucial role, even though it's not part of Google's algorithm. It helps in understanding the importance of conducting an SEO backlink analysis to strengthen the backlink profile and monitor and check a site's backlinks and their value.
Understandably, there would be riots if Google were to arbitrarily decide which websites are trusted and which are not, and therefore askew search results based on invisible criteria.
So, the method of determining which websites are instead based more so on data. One data point that google collects is backlinks.
A backlink is simply the process of website A linking to website B, usually naturally embedded through content such as blogs. These backlinks, especially 'inbound links', are what help to determine a website’s credibility, and therefore search rankings. As such they are essential for SEO, affecting rankings through the quality and significance of the backlink profile.
What a backlink checker will do, is scour the aforementioned indexes for any backlinks to a particular website that you ask it to retrieve information about. The checker achieves this by either accessing pre-existing indexes or keeping its index of websites.
In the case of the latter, the index gets larger and therefore smarter through user contribution and usage.
Choosing The Correct Backlink Checker For Your Website
The first step to improving your search engine rankings through backlinks is, of course, being aware of their impact and using this to inform your competitor’s research.
However, you still need to be aware of how you engage with information about your website’s backlinks or competitor backlinks.
These are two entirely different use-case scenarios, and as such will need different approaches and different tools. The only thing worse than not taking advantage of a backlink checker is using one poorly and ineffectively.
There are dozens, possibly hundreds of backlink checkers that exist. As discussed, a majority of these are free and basic tools. These are intended for the casual user. Someone who, for example, runs a hobbyist blog and is curious about the backlink performance of their website or of competing blogs.
Free backlink checkers are also often made available as a teaser to the full premium tools of an SEO suite. This is because backlink checkers are low-intensity to operate, and can be used within a web-browser.
By making a basic backlink checker free and building a user base through this free tool, users are integrated into the company ecosystem.
They are aware of the premium products that the company offers, and are more likely to purchase these thanks to the goodwill that has been built with users through allowing free use of the tool.
Unfortunately, when you’re trying to build a brand or build an authority website, these free checkers won’t cut it. They won’t give you access to the tools you need for substantial growth. For marketers and entrepreneurs, a premium backlink checker will be the right choice.
The difference in features between a premium backlink checker and a free backlink checker will be like night and day. But not only will you have more features available, but you will also have a more personalized experience. This can be achieved through the use of personal notifications, profiles, and more.
After the choice of a free backlink checker vs a premium one, it’s also important to choose the right backlink checker for your needs. First and foremost this should involve comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of different backlink checkers. Utilizing a free backlinks checker tool can be a great starting point for those new to backlink analysis, offering a detailed analysis of a website's backlink profile at no cost and providing insights into additional metrics beyond just backlinks.
Do you want a backlink checker that can identify new competitor links in 1 - 2 days, but has a smaller index overall? Or would you rather use a backlink checker with a comprehensive index, but a much slower link retrieval process?
Our Backlink Checkers Exclusive Features
Still, trying to decide on the right backlink checker for you? We’d love to introduce you to the features of Ranktracker, our custom-built suite of SEO tools that includes a premium backlink checker.
Get an instant backlink analysis tool for any domain
Choose any of your competitor sites, big or small, and we’ll give you a breakdown of their backlink activity. By scanning our database of 2.7trillion links (and counting!), we can instantly tell you which sites have linked to your competitors. Our database is always learning and always updating.
Take a deeper look at every competitor's backlink
Our backlink checker doesn’t stop at ‘what’. We’ll give you a full ‘who, where, and why’ profile of your competitor site’s backlink activity. This includes the hooks that other sites have used to link to your competitor, whether they used a nofollow or dofollow link, and more!
View any website’s new and lost links
It’s not uncommon for backlinks to turn into lost links after a certain amount of time. This is where you can take advantage of this and take the place of lost links by creating relevant content. We’ll also continually search your competitor’s backlink profile for new links, and update this within 1 day.
View Domain Authority, Domain Rating & URL Rating for every link
What you want to know from backlinks, is how they’re contributing to your competitors' search rankings. With our comprehensive Domain Rating system, we’ll show you where your competitors are positioned related to other sites in our database. We’ll also give each site an overall URL rating, showing the quality of the backlinks they receive.
Save the best backlinks for later
Want to further optimize which backlinks you should act on? You can save any interesting backlinks to be referenced later. All of the same, essential information will be available, regardless of when you view your saved backlinks again.
Find powerful quality backlinks you can replicate easily
One of the strengths of backlink checkers is that they take the stress out of finding links. With a good backlink checker, you’ll have assistance in identifying which backlinks are most relevant to you and your website, facilitating effective link building strategies.
While backlinks are powerful, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Backlinks are a matter of quality over quantity. Focusing your efforts on receiving a lot of backlinks rather than crafting relevant and thoughtful backlinks will lead to your website’s reputation sinking. Avoiding spammy links is crucial as they can significantly harm your SEO efforts and rankings.
In the same way that Google rewards authoritative websites, it can also penalize low-quality websites. This will happen if Google perceives the website as generating spam content, or otherwise misleading users with spammy links.
In the worst-case scenario, Google can remove your website entirely from search indexes. This means that you won’t appear in search results at all, no matter how relevant a user’s search is to your content.
Because of the number of websites that Google has to monitor for spam content, most of this filtering is done by an automatic system. These automatic systems are much stricter than a human can be, and they lack context. Anything that this automatic filter perceives to be spam will be immediately penalized.
It’s possible to dispute such penalties, but this is a process that can take weeks or even months. That’s thousands of valuable searches that you’re not appearing in.
Instead, you need to use tools such as backlink checkers to identify and create high-quality content that sites will want to backlink to. Understanding why backlinks are crucial for SEO—serving as a vote of confidence from one site to another and significantly impacting search rankings—is essential in crafting a strategy that prioritizes high-quality and relevant backlinks.
The most essential advice for replicating backlinks is to spy on the backlinks that already exist. Look at the hooks that websites use to backlink to your competitors. Find the most common of these, and cement your place within the ranks of this type of content by producing content that leads to relevant backlinks.
You should also take advantage of the lost links of your competitors. These are backlinks that are free for the taking, and you know that there is demand for them because they’ve already been used by other sites.
It’s also beneficial to try and accrue niche backlinks. If you’re the only website that has backlink opportunities for a particular topic, that means that you’re going to be generating organic backlinks whenever another website writes about it.
The Exclusive Free Backlink Checker Tool From Ranktracker
Our backlink checker, which comes as part of our groundbreaking SEO suite Ranktracker, will help you to identify and take advantage of backlinks pointing from your competitors. You’ll be spying on their digital presence, tracking every site that links to them, including incoming links, and understanding why these connections exist.
Our context-aware tools will help you to identify which backlink opportunities you should act on, and which are safe to ignore, including differentiating between nofollow links and those that pass PageRank.
The experience of using our backlink checker is entirely tailored to you and your website, meaning that you can prioritize the backlinks that are the most relevant to your brand.
If you’ve been left scratching your head, wondering what your competitor sites are doing to generate so much traffic, let us help you.
We’ll give you instant, custom-built reports about your competitor’s backlink profile. The information we provide is easy to digest, and you have ultimate control over how you use what we find out.
Our domain ranking and URL ratings will position your site against your competitors, and your competitors against each other, analyzing the diversity and quality of backlink sources, including referring domains.
With an easy to understand system, you’ll be able to see which competitors you should be worrying about, and make them worry about you instead.
Our backlink checker is available through a structured pricing plan, which is flexible to the scale of your site and your goals. You can upgrade your plan or downgrade it at any time, no questions asked.
