Backlinks refers to when a different page links to your website from another website. Backlinks were once very popular as website ranking parameters but with time Google among other search engines introduced other ranking factors. However, backlinks still hold a very important position in obtaining high ranking on the search engine results page.
The once popular free backlink analysis tool, Yahoo Site Explorer ceased to be back in 2011, and this gave room for emergence of many other popular backlink analysis tools in the market. Those that existed back then such as Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer became more eminent as those who depended on Yahoo Site Explorer were forced to make a switch. Some of the tools that emerged at that time and dominate the SEO world today include Ahrefs among others.
Today, there are thousands of backlink analysis tools flooding the SEO markets, including the free and the paid ones. This has made the process of choosing a practical instrument from such a wide variety using the price-quality consideration a daunting task.
Initially sites would rank high depending on the number of backlinks that they had, but in 2015, ranking high depends on the number of quality backlinks that a site has. Therefore, the determining factor of good backlink analysis tools should mere be based on quality backlinks rather than just backlinks. The following are the top backlink analysis tools that can help you through your quality backlink analysis process, so you can attract massive traffics which can finally become conversions.
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Ahrefs
If you are probably looking for the most reputable backlinks analysis tool, then Ahrefs is the best choice. Ahrefs offers quite a good number of information on different features than any other tool, including date and time, number of social shares, number of backlinks, types of backlinks, referring domain and IP among other information. It breaks down the links in every imaginable way and provides lots of visualisation options including graphs. With this tool you can view the real time backlink changes. This tool offers two types of accounts, the free and the premium. When you sign up for the free account, you only get up to 10 results, as for the premium account, the results are unlimited.
Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is a very popular tool in SEO as it gives an exceptionally comprehensive analysis on links. It has an amazing index size and prides itself on its ability to convert that index into valuable reports. This tool is available on free and paid versions. The paid version offers more features than the free one. It enables users to make site comparisons, analyse anchor text, and export existing backlinks to a CSV format. It also enables domain link and back link counts and can separate the .edu and .gov links from the other links to allow analysis of quality backlinks. Majestic SEO also lets you trend external links over time. However, its interface is not so sophisticated and may require some practise to use. Free analysis of backlinks is only allowed for the first 1,000 backlinks.
SEMRUSH
SEMRUSH has been recently updated with new features to make it a highly robust tool for SEO use. It is only available on paid version, which comes with a 14 days free trial after which payment can be made. If you find it to be amazing after the 14 days free trial, you can make a purchase at a price of $149. You may cancel the 14 days free trial before they are over and you will not be charged, but you won’t find a good reason to cancel as it is an amazing tool. It is powered by an extensive database which gets daily updates to enable users check their backlink statistics accurately. It displays a lot of useful information including the country from which most of your backlinks are coming from. This tool also supports backlink comparison and you can use it to make comparisons with your competitors’ domains and generate a complete report.
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SEO Spyglass
SEO Spyglass is a one of its kind, being available as an independent desktop application. It enables downloading of links on a PDF format and also keeps a rich database of links. It can fetch real time data on links status, page rank, and anchor text in use among others. SEO Spyglass is unlike the other tools which are available on a monthly fee basis. It is available at a fee of $99.75 and after which it can be used for a lifetime without any payments. You can also purchase it at $249 if it is part of the SEO Powersuit.
SEOMoz/Open Site Explorer
This tool came to be back in 2010 when Yahoo Site Explorer was about to die from the market. SEOMoz/Open Site Explorer is developed by Moz.com, produced to offer qualitative analysis. Open Site Explorer produces reports based on domain authority and anchor text using the filter process. It is available for free, though paid version also exists for more backlinks. For instance, analysing backlinks more than the first 1,000 will require payment. It allows you to make site comparisons via the domain authority benchmark. You can export the existing backlinks to a CSV file and also supports analysis of anchor text. It is a very useful tool for building a strategy of getting better ranking on the search engine results page.
Raven Tools
Raven Tools gives you a free trial for 30 days with complete features of their premium account. It behaves in much similar way as SEOMoz as it provides you with plenty of tools to manage your SEO online campaigns. However, it lacks a number of features that SEOMoz offers. Raven Tools lets users import their backlink profiles and monitor up to 50,000 of those backlinks at a charge of $99 per month.
Link Diagnosis
Link Diagnosis has a very much easy to use interface, although it makes it quite difficult to start with as it is locked down to Mozilla Firefox browser, which also does require a plugin for report viewing. However, it is available for free but the paid account offers more functionalities. It is relatively quick, enables anchor text analysis, nofollow links visibility and export to CSV functionality support. It also drills down into backlinks to specific WebPages.
BackLinkWatch
This tool is particularly popular among bloggers and you can use it to check backlinks to your own blog. BackLinkWatch provides all the necessary information about your blog’s backlinks. It also has lots of pop ups, which although can be closed with a click, they can be a little annoying to some users.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is among the most popular tools suitable for content marketing and it offers both a free and a premium version. The premium or pro version has quite a number of added advantages such as enabling users to check backlinks to their domain or a single page of their website. It also gives you the option of exporting the existing links into a comma delimited format (CSV).
OpenLinkProfiler
OpenLinkProfiler is well known to provide freshest data on backlinks, supported by a very large database which stores the lists of backlinks. The free version of OpenLinkProfiler enables you to download up to 100 links on a file and export it to a CSV format. It also offers different scores which are very helpful in enabling users understand the backlinks quality.
Bing Webmaster Tools
It appears as if Yahoo Site Explorer is finally reborn in Bing Webmaster Tools. This tool possesses rather similar features as its antecedent, Bing Link Explorer. It allows you to view reports back in time as early as 6 month, analyse links into specific WebPages, view the anchor texts which relate to the inbound links, export existing backlink data to Excel sheet for further analysis and manipulation. The advantages of using this tool are that it is available for free, easy to use, supports analysis by page and is always up to date.
CognitiveSEO Backlink Checker
CognitiveSEO is well renowned for supporting evaluation of the different aspects of a backlink source. It is available in the free and paid version. The free version is rather limited, providing a list of 25 backlinks with valuable information. Its interface is very user-friendly and it comes with a perfectly designed dashboard which offers everything within a single page.
Web SEO Analytics
Web SEO Analytics is an amazing SEO tool available on a free and paid version. It enables you to generate a report on the number and specific URLs of your site’s backlinks. The report can be used for competition analysis or for future reference purposes. With Web SEO Analytics, you can get page and domain authority, PageRank, link number and quality, age of domain, among other important SEO features. It is a great tool for analysing your competitor’s SEO strategy.
The free version gives you the chance to analyse the first 1,000 backlinks for every single report. You also get 1 report per day. The paid version has unlimited features and is available at $32.25, though you can sign up for a 10 days free trial where you get the unlimited features for 10 days.
Traffic Travis
Traffic Travis is a strong SEO tool that is suitable for advanced users and beginners in SEO. It is also a desktop application similar to SEO Spyglass with a number of free SEO Tools, including SEO performance analysis. This tool is popular among webmasters and offers quite a number of features including Alexa Traffic Rank, number of indexed pages on Google, Yahoo and Bing, number of sites linking to your domain from country of initial search, competitor backlink analysis among others.
This tool offers a lot more SEO tools for other purposes, such as keyword research, PPC analysis and SEO analysis. Traffic Travis is available for free and can be downloaded from their site.
Google Webmaster Tools
This is a metrics dashboard which provides a detailed view of backend of sites. It mainly displays activities of a site on the internet as tracked by Google search crawlers. Some of the backlink analysis features offered by Google Webmaster Tools include a list of domains that link to your site, number of links from each site that links to your site, a list of anchor texts that are used on external links that point to your website. It can also display the number of internal links from your site. Google Webmaster Tools is also very beneficial for other SEO uses such as keyword researching, detecting crawl mistakes to facilitate easy diagnostics, submitting RSS feed, sitemap and generating Robots.txt among other SEO features. Google Webmaster Tools is a free SEO tool.
Yandex.Webmaster
Yandex.Webmaster gives you backlink analysis for free where you get to analyse as many backlinks as they can feel is appropriate for you. You can only use it for verified domains only, that is, you must be the owner of the domain which you intend to use it with. It operates with its own web crawler known as YandexBot.
Alexa
Alexa is an online backlink checker SEO tool and is only available on a paid version, but users can sign up for their 30 days free trial. After the trail period is over, you can pay for the service at a cost of $9.99 per month.
SEOprofiler
SEOprofiler is also an online backlink checker tool available on a paid and free version. The free version supports up to two projects and you can export up to a maximum of 1,000 backlinks for a single project. The paid version on the other hand is available in four different modules, the $49.95, $99.95, $249.95 and $999.95 per month modules. The $49.95 per month version supports up to 10 projects and you can export up to 100,000 and up to 200,000 backlinks for online use for each project. The $99.95 per month version supports 50 projects and exporting 200,000 backlinks as well as for online use. When you sign up for the $249.95 per month version, you get to handle up to 150 projects, export up to 200,000 backlinks as well as for online use for every project. With the $999.95 per month module, you can work on 800 projects, online access of up to 200,000 backlinks and export up to 200, 000 backlinks. It is a good tool for backlink analysis, but way too expensive for beginners to start with.
Searchmetrics Suite
Searchmetrics Suite is an excellent analysis tool, offering you two account types, the free and paid one. With the free version, you get up to 10 backlink analysis per report without registration. If you choose to register however, you get up to 500 backlinks analysis at no charge. The paid version is available at $69 per month and you get as many backlinks as there are in the index. It uses its own web crawler called SearchmetricsBot.
With these backlink analysis tools offering different benefits at either free or paid charge, you can certainly analyse your site’s backlinks as well analyse your competitors’ backlinks. They are an excellent way of getting massive traffics that can be turned to conversions and high search engine ranks.
