Many SEOs consider backlinks as the backbone of an effective search engine optimisation campaign. According to Thrive My Way, the top-ranking sites on Google contain 3.8x more backlinks compared to the nine remaining sites on the first page of the SERPs. Focusing on link building will help your website rank higher in the SERPs and largely contribute to your SEO strategy’s success.
To develop an excellent backlink strategy for search engines, you need a powerful backlink tool to view your website and your competitor’s backlink profiles comprehensively. This article will thoroughly overview the top paid and free backlink-building tools for modern digital marketers.
Free Tools
Free backlink tools are available for those who are budget-restricted or want to try out a company’s services before fully committing to a paid plan. Below are some free tools that can make the process of acquiring backlinks much easier.
SEO SpyGlass
SEO Spyglass allows you to easily handle backlink research, one of the most crucial SEO tasks. Throughout the years, the team behind the tool has enhanced its function to provide its users with some of the most complete and accurate backlink profiles you’ll encounter – both for you and your competitor’s site. SEO Spyglass can boost your SEO strategy by tracking, analysing, and replicating your competitor’s backlinks.
The free version of SEO SpyGlass gives you access to up to 1,100 backlinks per domain and checks an unlimited number of domains. You can use this feature to research your competitors and your websites. And if you have additional data at your disposal, you can connect SEO SpyGlass to other tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Once you connect SEO Spyglass to these tools, you can process the necessary data using their dashboard – free of charge.
SEO Spyglass can be your home base for backlink research and management.
Unique Feature:
Allows you to sort and filter discovered backlink data using multiple parameters such as linking and linked pages, anchor text and anchor URL, dofollow and nofollow attributes, link source’s domain and page authority, and more. Their fully specced-out dashboard makes it great for analysing backlinks.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is arguably the most popular SEO tool today. It’s an entirely free backlink tool that offers a large data allowance. Although Google created this tool to help webmasters enhance their websites, it has certain limitations, including limited opportunities for backlinks.
You’ll need to verify your website ownership to access the Search Console. Once done, Google will give you access to multiple site-quality dashboards, including a long list of backlinks directly extracted from Google’s index. Remember that although the list is long, you can only view the top 1,000 results. This tool is simple, but the only downside is that it doesn’t offer any additional on-site metrics or analytical features.
This tool is best for gathering raw backlink data, which you can export to other tools like SEO Spyglass for further analysis.
Unique Feature:
What makes this tool stand out is the length of its backlink list. Compared to other backlink tools, Google Search Console eliminates low-quality backlinks and only counts the ones that matter.
SEObility
You need a great tool to review your website and your competitors’ backlink profiles. SEObility allows you to access three backlink checks per day, limiting the number of backlinks you can view to 400 per check. You may see this feature as a disadvantage, but this tool can sort the backlinks from highest to lowest, allowing you to see the best ones even though the list is limited. The links also come with additional parameters such as anchor texts, link types, and dofollow links, to name a few. You also get a summary of the backlink profile, including attributes like domain rating and several referring domains.
Unique Feature:
Although the free data allowance of 400 backlinks per check seems like a unique feature, what SEOs love the most about SEObility is its versatility. You can either check backlinks missed by Search Console or SEO Spyglass or use it to fit your competitors’ backlinks and gain valuable insights from their strategy.
OpenLinkProfiler
OpenLinkProfiler opens multiple options at your disposal. One is link diagnosis, which allows you to check a page’s backlinks or a whole website and generate extensive reports and optimisations. This backlink tool offers various output and other features, such as updating its collection of links every five minutes and exporting 200,000 links per domain.
Some of its key features include:
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Backlink Analysis
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Link Disinfection
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Anchor Texts
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Find domain pages with maximum links
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Linkage
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Link Alerts
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Countries Section
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LIS (Link Influence Score) Distribution
One cool feature this backlink tool has is the Link Influence Score, which measures the quality of backlinks to detect ranking in search engines. OpenLinkProfiler is widely used for its proficiency in analysing multiple parameters like demographics, anchor texts, countries, industries, and many more.
Unique Feature:
SEOs who love gathering practical intelligence about their website and knowing its popularity in their industry will see much value from this free tool. It offers many valuable features aside from backlink analysis tools, which can help identify ideal referring domains to get links from.
SE Ranking
SE Ranking is an all-in-one software that’s good for overall SEO analysis and backlink checking. Its checker tool utilises Google Webmaster tools data to inspect the links from your websites or competitors. While they offer advanced subscriptions for freelancers, agencies, and enterprises, they provide a free version of their backlink checker for those who want to try it out.
There’s tons of value from using SE Ranking’s free backlink checker. It allows users to monitor backlinks and check if they encounter any changes. Once you add your new backlinks, the tool will run regular parameter checks and notify you once the backlinks experience any change. This tool also keeps track of your crucial backlink metrics, reviews if they originated from an authoritative domain, and examine page-specific metrics to see if the linking page is popular or not.
Unique Feature:
Many SEOs praise SE Rankings for their ability to generate a detailed link analysis for the following attributes: follow/nofollow, index/noindex, cached/not cached, anchor text, domain authority, and social popularity, and so much more. It allows you to disavow links and generate the necessary files to submit directly to Google.
Paid Tools
Free backlink checkers may be capable of analysing backlinks, but there are times when the capability is not enough to meet the needs of certain organisations. Paying a premium for SEO tools is not only plausible but also necessary, especially if you want to deliver better quality results to your business or clients.
Freelancers, agencies, and enterprises with a budget and who prefer to access more tools for a more comprehensive backlink checking can benefit significantly from paid tools like the ones below. Please note that some of these tools come as a package – you’re not only paying for the backlink tools, but you also get other premium SEO tools on the side.
Ahrefs
Ahref’s backlink checker tool is arguably one of the most potent checkers available for SEOs today. Ahrefs have the second most active web crawlers, right after Google. They claim that they have the industry’s best backlink database, 30.45 trillion known links, 170 million unique domains, and 6.51 billion pages crawled daily. They update their backlink database every 15 minutes, ensuring their data is as fresh as possible.
Their free backlink checker is already potent by itself. Without any cost, you can use their link-building tools to check domains and metrics for any target on a page level, monitor backlinks and the trends of backlink profiles, and get a complete summary of your target’s backlink profile. Ahrefs also makes it easy for anyone to see the number of backlinks they’ve lost for reasons such as deleted pages or others. This tool also allows you to scrutinise the internal links and identify broken backlinks.
Price:
Paying for their premium backlink tools also means you get access to their entire suite of SEO tools, including those for keyword research, site audit, and more. The Standard Ahrefs plan costs $199/month, but if you choose to pay annually, you can avail the plan for $166/month, rounding up to $1,990/year instead of $2,388/year.
Moz Pro
Much like Ahrefs, paying for a Moz Pro subscription to use their Link Explorer tool also means you get to use their whole suite of SEO tools. Link Explorer is a powerful tool that compares your website’s detailed link profile for up to 4 other competitors. This tool can measure your website’s backlinks, linking domains, and anchor texts, to name a few. This information can help you create a high-quality link-building strategy and gain an edge against competitors.
This tool also has a handy side tool called Link Intersect, where you can see the websites linking to your competitors, excluding you. The insights you’d gain from this tool helps identify the ideal websites for link building.
Aside from Link Explorer, Moz Pro offers an all-in-one SEO solution perfect for small businesses that can’t afford more expensive tools like Ahrefs. Their price plans are relatively cheap, and anyone from freelancers to small business owners can leverage these tools’ power. With Moz Pro, anyone can easily do link building and other core SEO areas without much fuss.
Price:
Moz Pro costs $99/month ($79/month if you opt for an annual subscription). But if you’re hesitant and want to try out their tools first, Moz offers a free 30-day trial.
Majestic SEO
Unlike the other tools in this list that offer a full suite of SEO tools, Majestic focuses solely on backlinks. That fact alone makes this tool one-of-a-kind, and their team claims that Majestic is the best backlink checker in the world. This tool offers users access to unprecedented amounts of data, allowing them to use link intelligence and domain metrics such as backlink histories, keyword search volume, and many more.
One of the best features of Majestic is their very own Flow Metrics™, a graph-based metric that provides a much preferred deeper analysis over simple aggregations of neighbouring metrics. Flow Metrics™ involves two principal metrics: Citation Flow and Trust Flow. SEOs and marketers can use these metrics to picture your website’s influence accurately. Many appreciate quantifiable scores on backlinks because of their importance as a ranking factor.
Majestic is no doubt a fantastic SEO tool for analysing backlinks. Many successful agencies worldwide have benefitted from their top-tier link data databases. Having real-time access to this database is like a superweapon you can use to charge up your digital marketing efforts.
Price:
Although Majestic SEO comes with a free version, many experts would suggest opting for their subscription plans. The Lite plan costs $49.99/month and is ideal for prospecting small groups of websites. Agencies, domain traders, and SEO consultants will benefit from Majestic’s Pro plan, which costs $99.99/month.
BuzzSumo
While BuzzSumo is ideal for analysing your and your competitor’s content, it’s also an excellent tool for your backlink strategy. BuzzSumo understands that copy alone isn’t enough to draw visitors to your website. Since backlinks are webmasters’ vote of confidence, having a lot on your website means getting their trust and your audience. That’s why they created a backlink analysis tool to help people like you determine who’s linking to your site and find potential areas for improvement.
With their checker tool, you can peek at the websites linking to the best domains and their competitors. You can sort these links by social engagements so you can zero in on the links that attract the most attention. The team behind BuzzSumo also ensures that their link database is constantly updated so that you won’t miss out on anything. Once you access the data you need, you can pump those reports into Excel sheets so you can analyse them further later.
Price:
BuzzSumo offers a free plan for those trying out their services.
Those who want access to better features such as unlimited monthly searches or multiple users can do so for as low as $99/month.
SemRush
SemRush is considered to be one of the best SEO tools in the industry. Using this tool correctly is a surefire way for any business owner to grow their businesses. From an analysis perspective, SemRush allows users to check your website’s links and identify potential issues such as low-quality links. This tool can make analysing a backlink profile straightforward since it lets you view the total amount of inbound links a page has pointed toward your website. If the mentioned page has around a hundred or more incoming links, it’s likely a collection of spammy links from suspicious websites.
Some of their backlink tools include the following:
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Backlink Analytics
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Backlink Audit Tool
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Backlink Gap
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Bulk Backlink Analysis
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Link Building Tool
We recommend SemRush the most because it’s the best all-in-one SEO tool on this list.
Price:
SemRush’s subscription plan goes from $119.95/month to $449.95/month. If you want to save more, pay for an annual subscription and save up to 17% of the plan price.
Linkody
If you prefer something simple and easy to use, you’ll find Linkody the best value for your money. Linkody is an excellent tool for monitoring incoming site links and identifying link-building opportunities. It’s user-friendly, cheap, and, most of all, remarkable in tracking your link-building campaigns.
Linkody offers easy-to-understand dashboards filled with essential metrics such as anchor text, follow/nofollow, and Mozrank, to name a few. Its robust link profile analysis gives you a complete view of your website’s backlink profile. You can also discover the backlinks your competitors use, and you can leverage this information to benefit your link-building strategy.
Price:
Linkody’s subscription plans range from $14.90/month (Webmaster) to $153.90/month (Agency XL).
LinkMiner
Mangool’s LinkMiner tool doesn’t come with any other SEO tools. It is purely a backlink checker, and it has some pretty extensive backlink-related features. Since it solely focuses on backlinks, LinkMiner allows its users to mine their competitors’ most potent backlinks. You may also examine a preview of the referring website and the tool’s anchor location. With over 9.5 trillion backlinks in their database and 2.5 trillion uniquely crawled URLs, LinkMiner remains one of the industry’s most cost-effective backlink tools.
Price:
Mangool’s Link Miner is an inexpensive solution for your backlink needs. Their basic subscription plans start from $49.00/month, and you can even get it for 40% less if you choose to pay annually.
Conclusion
Backlinks are very important for SEO. Acquiring it can be challenging, but they’re crucial for your SEO campaign’s success. You need to ensure that you’re keeping up with the backlinks that are making their SEO efforts successful. You also need to analyse not only your website’s backlink profile but your competitors as well.
If you want to scan your backlink profile or your competitor’s site efficiently, this list of free website backlink tools has you covered. The tools listed above can give you access to different features for checking backlinks and any other necessary process to execute a successful link-building effort on any search engine.
