5 Best Backlink Tools That Will Benefit Your SEO
Why are Backlinks so relevant?
A backlink is a link to your website from another website. In the eyes of search engines, backlinks are a bit like votes for your site. The more links you have, the higher your site is likely to rank in search engines.
Not all backlinks are created equal, though. The best backlinks are ones from big, respected websites. Backlinks from spammy or suspicious websites can be actively harmful to your digital site.
After installing a WordPress SEO plugin like All in One SEO or Yoast and following the best practices, the next step is to think through your backlink strategy.
Best Backlink Tools
Ahrefs
Ahrefs holds one of the largest backlink indexes in the whole world.
Besides managing backlinks, Ahrefs is designed to perform most of the activities an SEO Pro needs to do daily, although it is pretty easy to use for non-Pros. But specifically in the backlink area, Ahrefs provides a lot of tools to do their research.
For example, one of these tools, called “Link Intersect”. Lets you discover sites that link to your competitors but not to you. This is very useful information because if a site links to more than one of your marketing competitors. There’s a good chance that it could add a link to your digital site.
Semrush
Within the Semrush, you can find the Backlink Analysis tool, a powerful aid for getting functional data about backlinks from any domain. With its huge database of 26,5 trillion ones, Semrush offers a lot of revealing charts showing new & lost backlinks, authority ranks of all referrals, the evolution of backlink generating processes, and much more.
With the Backlink Audit tool, you can integrate your Search Console data and avoid being penalized by Penguin. You can also discover and delete toxic ones and send them to Google’s disavow tool, keeping your backlink profile clean thanks to automatic and periodic tracking.
Moz
Moz Pro is a complete suite of professional SEO tools, in which Moz Link Explorer is one of the main utilities. It is especially useful to do reverse engineering on your competitors’ backlinks. To see its magic at work, you just have to enter a competitor’s domain or a specific URL. And Moz will show you all of its backlinks. For each one, you could see some metrics, such as a domain authority index, the number of linking domains, a spam score, and a list of the top links.
Majestic
Majestic SEO offers this tool as a Chrome App, bringing backlink analysis directly to your browser. It’s a fast way to verify the strength of any page according to its information. The Trust Flow and Citation Flow scores appear immediately on the URL bar for any page you visit, together with summarized information about URLs and domains linking to the digital page.
SEO Spyglass
SEO SpyGlass is part of SEO PowerSuite, a set of tools awarded with lots of positive reviews. Unlike most SEO tools, this one is an application you install on your computer, whether it be a Mac, a Windows, or a Linux machine.
SEO Spyglass reportedly has the biggest link database of all known tools. You can also add your own links, importing them directly from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The tool identifies potentially harmful links to avoid being penalized by Penguin 4.0 (the most recent version of Google’s search engine). It calculates the risks involved in a penalty, taking into account the same factors used by Google. If it finds a threat, you can neutralize it with a few clicks, using SpyGlass-exclusive disavow file generator. You don’t have to worry about doing it right on your own.