No matter the size and scale of your brand, your online presence is everything in the digital age. The impact of the pandemic on people’s habits means that digital engagement can have a maximum impact on your brand image, your website credibility, and ultimately your profit and performance.

Backlinks are not a new concept. They’ve been around for as long as search engines themselves have…but only recently have we begun to understand the significance of using them correctly, and the detriments of using them incorrectly.

Backlinks are sort of like “votes” for the credibility of a website. Just as customers leave a positive review on products or services, other websites can backlink to you in their content, and this can act as a positive mark against your site.

The more good backlinks that you have, the higher your credibility rises - this directly translates into a higher position in search results.

The process of accruing backlinks is entirely passive - write good quality content that is reliable and well-sourced, and sites will want to backlink to you.

It’s a win-win relationship; linking to you makes other sites more credible, and getting backlinks makes your site more credible. All of this with no extra effort on your part.

Sounds too good to be true? There is a catch with backlinks - and once again, it’s one that you can’t easily mitigate.

This is the internet we’re talking about - nobody can quantify the number of new websites, new articles, and new links that are generated every day. And each day, a higher percentage of this content is created with malicious intentions.

Scam websites, factually misleading sites, and malevolent actors all want a piece of the evolving digital space…and a quick way for them to become more visible is through backlinking to your site.

Eventually, these get found out, and Google takes action to limit their visibility, and after repeated offenses will even mark the site as spam. But if these sites have ever backlinked to you, then you’re going to be dragged down with them.

Even if you’ve never heard of the site before, had no idea that they’re backlinking to you, and don’t endorse their message, you could be putting all of your SEO work at risk by having backlinks associated with low-quality websites.

Thankfully, you don’t need to leave your website visibility up to chance - with the Backlink Monitor from Ranktracker, you can know exactly where your backlinks are showing up, who is using them, and most importantly you can disassociate your site from any low - quality backlinks.

And you can do all of that on autopilot, without lifting a finger.

Our backlink monitor lets you track multiple domains at once, and can access the historical data for your site. This is important for maintaining quality backlinks and making sure that you don’t drop in search engine results.

It’s not too late to reign in your backlinks, and our mission at Ranktracker is to make it as simple as possible for you to stay in control.

Backlink Monitor Overview

At a basic level, a backlink monitor allows you to view all of the backlinks to a specific site within a certain time frame. You can see which site linked to your site, the hook that they used in the backlink and the article or webpage that the backlink appeared in. A backlink monitoring tool is designed to simplify this process by aggregating and analyzing backlink data from various sources, including Google Search Console. Integrating with Google Search Console allows users to import backlinks directly into their backlink monitoring tool for a comprehensive analysis.

A backlink monitor can show you the backlink profile of a site at a glance - you’ll be able to see the total number of backlinks, aggregated from every site that the checker found. The monitor may also be able to distinguish between unique IP addresses and unique web pages.

Most backlink monitors will allow you to view specific information about these links. You may be able to see if a dofollow or a nofollow link was used to backlink to your site. The difference is important, as it can determine whether authority is passed from another site to your site.

A dofollow link from a low-quality site is a much higher priority than a nofollow link from the same site…in the eyes of search engines, when they’re limiting spam sites, a dofollow link is as good as an endorsement.

Viewing all of this information is well and good, but you want a tool that can take action, and identify a crisis before it happens or help you to maintain the upstanding brand image that you currently have.

Good backlink monitors will allow you to remove links to your site if you find a low-quality page that has backlinked to you. Their link will become unusable, and their actions will have no impact on your credibility.

Another feature to look out for is the rating of sites that a backlink monitor can provide. As your online operations scale up, you won’t have time to critique every site that backlinks to you - instead of leaving your site’s fate to chance, you can understand the situation at a glance with a dedicated “spam score”.

What Is A Backlink Monitor?

While backlink monitors are high-quality tools, the way they work is simpler than you may think. The information that they use is accessible to anyone who knows where to look - a backlink monitor simply collects and parses the information in a way that is easier to understand.

Choosing the best backlink monitoring tool for your specific SEO and link-building needs is crucial, as the right tool can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of monitoring your backlinks.

A backlink monitor pulls from the indexes of search engines. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all index the World Wide Web to provide you with quick search results - but the indexing process also provides evidence of sites that exist on the internet.

Think of it as a physical archive of books that you would find in a library. By having a copy of books on-demand, people who know what they are looking for can quickly and easily find what they need.

Indexing the information means that it is easy to retrieve, as search engines simply recall from a large database of sites.

The process of indexing a site involves more than the information that you see from a Google search, however. For each unique webpage, search engines record all of the links that appear on the page. They also monitor the reputation of each site.

If a website has had a lot of reports or has shown behavior that is in line with known malicious websites, then Google can easily identify it as a low-quality website. This rating is stored alongside the index entry of the site.

A backlink monitor simply pulls from this index and displays the indexed information along with other useful things to know about specific sites. A good backlink monitor will have a large number of sites in its index, making it less likely that you miss any link activity to your site.

Choosing The Correct Backlink Monitoring Tool For Your Website

As the value of backlinks has become apparent, the number of tools to check and monitor backlinks has increased. With so much choice and many of the available backlink monitors involving paid subscription plans, it can be hard to determine which backlink monitor is right for your needs.

Broadly, you can find two types of backlink monitors - free, and paid. With the existence of free backlink monitors, a paid solution might not seem worth the investment - but it all depends on the scale of your brand, and what you want to get out of a backlink monitor.

Free backlink monitors can see backlinks, and can show you a broad overview of the activity of your site - but it may be harder to find more in-depth information than this. This may be because free backlink monitors have a much smaller index than paid alternatives.

A lot of the action that a free backlink checker can help you with is also manual - you will need to continually check for developments in your backlink profile, and keep on top of any changes by yourself.

Free backlink monitoring solutions are ideal for the curious SEO beginner - if you run a hobbyist blog and want to see how your project is performing, then a free tool will cover all of your needs.

For the business owner, the entrepreneur, and the experienced content curator, however, you need a more sophisticated tool. Advanced features such as identifying and solving deadlinks, and tracking multiple domains at once.

This is where a paid backlink monitor will set itself apart from a free one. Paid monitors often come at several different price plans, allowing you full freedom in how much you pay for the features that you need.

There are other features to consider when choosing a backlink monitor, to narrow down your choices even further. When selecting a backlink monitor, it's crucial to consider how it can support your link building strategy, including tracking and managing link building campaigns. The right backlink monitor can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of link building campaigns, helping to refine and improve your link building strategy over time.

When comparing tools, you should take into consideration the size of the index that they have. A larger index means more sites to find backlinks for. A good backlink monitor will also be able to tell the difference between a new webpage and a new IP address that is backlinking to you.

It’s also worth comparing the UI and the design of various backlink monitors. It’s always best to go for a tool that has a minimal design and displays information clearly and concisely. You should also take into consideration the opinions of your team - try to choose a backlink monitor that will be familiar to them, and easy to use.

Finally, take a look at the pricing plans that are available for each backlink monitor you are considering. Some features may be locked behind a higher tier of subscription - this can include important selling points of the tool or minor additions that you can live without.

Our Backlink Monitor Exclusive Features

Backlink monitoring software should make your life easier, and not more difficult. Our Backlink Monitor is part of our commitment to making high-quality SEO tools that just work. The Ranktracker backlink monitor provides comprehensive insights into website backlinks, including tracking referring domains and identifying spammy links to protect your site's SEO health. It has several exclusive, purpose-built features to help you achieve online relevance and digital greatness.

Historical data since 2019

It’s good to live in the present when managing your online portfolio, but it’s important to always be aware of your past backlinks. Using historical data, our backlink monitor can identify dead backlinks all the way back to 2019, and help you to make them live again. Keep your portfolio up to date, and seamlessly solidify your position in search rankings.

Page analysis

Get an in-depth analysis of every webpage that is using your backlinks, with features such as whether the backlink is broken, a status code, a custom URL rating for each page, a page spam score, referring pages and domains, referring IPS, first seen, and more!

Domain Rating, URL Rating

Looks can be deceiving, and it’s easy for a malicious site to masquerade as a high-quality one. Don’t let the wool be pulled over your eyes, and use the Ranktracker backlink monitor to identify which pages are trustworthy, and which ones you need to remove backlinks from.

Spam score per URL & domain

We take data from Google and other major search engines to determine which websites have been flagged as spam - getting a backlink to one of these sites is code red for your online portfolio. Our backlink monitor can set up custom alerts, and help you to clear these harmful backlinks.

First seen, last seen

Just because a backlink is live, may not mean it’s active - track prioritizes the backlinks that are having the biggest impact on your visibility, by seeing when the backlink was first seen and the last time that it was seen.

Dofollow, Nofollow

Not all backlinks are created the same. Our backlink monitor can distinguish between a dofollow and a nofollow link, which is important for determining whether or not a backlink is giving your site authority or not.

Anchor texts

Want to watch for misleading backlinks, or want to know which keywords are driving clicks and engagement? Use the Ranktracker backlink monitor to see the anchor text that was used to create a backlink to your site,

Referring Domains and Networks

Quickly see exactly who is backlinking to your site, and get the information you need to investigate their content and determine if their backlinks are conducive to your online portfolio.

How does Backlink Monitoring Work?

You likely have enough things to worry about in your day-to-day work - that’s why you hired your SEO team or SEO manager. But the digital age is rapidly changing, and there are more ways than ever to optimize your search results, identify the content you should be prioritizing, and improve your search ranking.

Backlink monitoring isn’t something that should be neglected…but it can be an endless, tedious task. Not using a tool to identify backlinks means that you’re looking for needles in haystacks by trying to find sites that are using your pages.

If you do use a tool to help identify backlinks, then the next obstacle is, how do you take action on this? What are the best steps to take? How can you strike a balance between high-quality backlinks and having enough backlinks to contribute to your search ranking?

If that sounds like a lot to consider … that’s because it is. Nobody said that building a brand would be easy, but nobody could anticipate the level of influence the internet would have on business success or failure.

However, there’s a secret answer to the burning question of “how does backlink monitoring work?”

Backlink monitoring doesn’t have to be as intimidating as it seems. It should be a painless, autopilot process. Monitoring your backlinks is crucial for tracking the success of your link building efforts, allowing you to see the direct impact of your strategies on your site's backlink profile.

How backlink monitoring works, is first and foremost through awareness. You need to know the status of your backlinks, and whether any action needs to be taken. The first step to this will be using your backlink monitor to keep a catalog of the activity on your domains.

The next step to backlink monitoring is determining your priorities - do I want to maintain my current backlinks, and make sure that they’re still working? Do I want to see the most popular anchor text for my site, to help me to generate new backlinks?

This is all about understanding where your backlink profile stands right now, and where you want it to be in a few months.

If you’re in a fortunate position where you find that too many sites are backlinking to you, then you need to make sure that none of these links are harming your site. This includes being aware of spam rankings for domains, but also ensuring that you don’t have too many backlinks that use the same anchor text.

All of this can be an active process if you want it to be - and as a small-scale site, it’s easy to manually keep track of your backlinks. But once your operations begin to scale, you can’t give each update to your backlinks the same attention that you once did.

Setting up email alerts for important changes, and using settings that can automate the process of tasks such as fixing dead and lost links, will make the process of backlink monitoring much easier, much more efficient, and much more effective.

The Exclusive Backlink Monitor For Your Link Building Strategy From Ranktracker

Back in 2014, our founder Felix Rose-Collins saw the demand for a smart, flexible SEO tool; because he, his colleagues, and other businesses in his circle were the demand. So he partnered with Max, and they did what bigger, established companies failed to do. They created an SEO suite that met the needs of small and medium-sized brands.

Since then, our mission at Ranktracker has been clear - to develop high-quality, easy-to-use SEO tools for motivated business owners and their teams. We wanted to create meaningful software, without frustration, and without compromise.

Our backlink monitor is responsive, intuitive, and customizable. We have one of the most comprehensive indexes of websites of any backlink tool, and smart email alerts mean you never miss an update.

Plus, our tiered pricing plans allow you to dynamically choose the features you need, on an annual or monthly basis.

See how the Ranktracker Backlink Checker can optimize your SEO workflow today, with a 7-day free trial on us. We’re here to help your brand grow, thrive, and succeed.