Best Methods and Tools for Monitoring your Website's Backlinks
-
Recently, I've launched two websites. I want to make sure I'm doing a good job monitoring our link building efforts. I'm see a lot of tools out there to supplement my use of Open Site Explorer. What I want to know is what tools I should be using to monitor my links? My ultimate goal would be to have the data to track the number of links I'm adding a month so that I can use it for reporting.
There is another layer. Because the sites are new, OSE is actually not reporting any links found. I can only find reported links through Google Search Console. Any advice? Is this something where I will just have to wait for everything to get indexed?
-
Hi
Ahrefs is definitely a better option than SEMrsuh for this, because it has a more accurate link database. SEMRush and Moz both have less link data, so Ahrefs would give you the most complete picture. I suggested SEMrush because it is free tool (sort of, 10 free requests per day + 10 with an account).
-
Thanks everyone! I'll check all those resources out.
Are there a lot of overlaps with SEM Rush, Ahrefs and Moz?
-
Hi
I would go for Ahrefs and Majsitc site Explorer along with Google Webmaster.
In my opinion, use of these would give you a snopysis of new and exsiting backlinks for your site. You can also try MOZ site explorer tool. However, this is relatively new and has less data than the other two.
-
Another vote for Ahrefs.
I personally wouldn't use SEMrush for stuff like this as their backlink data isn't going to be as comprehensive. There is always Majestic as well, but I find that a bit clunky now.
Try the free trial with Ahrefs - you wont be disappointed
-Andy
-
Hi Jason,
My personal preference is Ahrefs. Now I do gather data from other sources, but I find ahrefs gives you the highest number of active links.
Thanks
-
Personally I use semrush.com to quickly monitor the backlinks to a website. It will give you a nice overview of all the referring ip’s and url’s and you can export it into Excel. However there is no option to see the changes over time (at least not in the free version). In Moz under “Links > Competitive metrics” on the History tab you can see graphs that compare some link data with your competitors over time. To get more information for a rapport I export the data from semrush once a week. This way I can show all the link metrics over time with the top referring domains for a website compared to the competitors. And yes it can take some time before the link metrics are indexed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Many Backlinks Can One build To Blog's Homepage Daily To Avoid Algorithm Penalties
Hello, Am new to blogging and also new to link building and things are pretty confusing for me right now, I was told by a friend that have spent years in the industry that the maximum number of Backlinks you should build for a domain to stay safe is 2 daily, but am seeing different thing on the internet, so I wanna know the exact number of quality Backlinks one can build to homepage daily to avoid penalties, please I need suggestions from pros. Sergio!
Link Building | | Gabriel50 -
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???
Link Building | | johnohara0 -
Starting a new site's link campaign... how to approach it?
Over the last few years I have been building content in my niche that I believe rivals some of the best content out there and deserves some attention. Although I have a plan to produce alot more content which I believe will take the quality and quantity of my content into a position among the top 5 or top 10 sites in my niche in the next 1-2 years, I decided that making that massive investment in content production irrespective of a consistent marketing plan is a recipe for failure because I need the positive feedback loop from site visitors to begin now, not in 2 years. Right now I'm in a position where I'm producing content that I think is better than alot of what's out there, and it's just not ranking the way I believe it should. I think I need to do a legitimate link building campaign to establish the website a little more firmly and put it on more level ground with some of its competitors. In Majestic SEO's "fresh index", most of my site's immediate competition have no more than 500 new domains in their links, though the biggest one has some 2,000. How can any link building effort I might take on possibly compare to links of this scale? Is there some "rule of thumb" for how many quality links I should aim for to get on square ground with some of the competitors on the lowest rungs? And if I try to build that many links at once, do I risk sending signals of untrustworthiness? (Assume I'm not going to be looking for any shoddy links, and in general will aim to follow Google guidelines.)
Link Building | | guitarsites0 -
Best Tool For Diagnosing A spammy Back Link Profile
Buongiorno from the river Wharfe 🙂 With Googles crusade to penalise sites with dodgy backlink profiles I'm looking for an automated tool which could flag up any dodgy links. Yes ive used Open Site Explorer but I really am after something that gives me a simple "yes theres a problem and heres where it is" type solution. Any inights welcome 🙂
Link Building | | Nightwing
Grazie tanto,
David0 -
Should we imitate our competitor's blog network?
One of our competitors has built a little blog network, and I'm wondering if it's worth it for us to imitate it. Here's how they have it set up: They have domain.com, their e-commerce site, and blog.domain.com. They also have a half-dozen EMD blogs set up that all link to each other and to the e-commerce site, each one supplying content related to one niche of their busines (e.g. kitchenwidgets.com, widgetsforkids.com, etc.). It seems they've been doing this since December 2011. In my opinion, the content on these EMD blogs is pretty low value. Sure enough, they have basically no inbound links from outside the blog network, and it's not getting shared socially. I'm having a hard time imagining a lot of long-tail searches that would bring in qualified shoppers, since they basically just write up 300-word long descriptions of photos. Based on SEMrush data, it doesn't look like this approach is hurting them -- they didn't take a Penguin dive in April, for example. But how likely is it that this approach is helping them enough to justify the time they must spend writing (probably ~30-60m a day)? It would be trivial for the algo to determine that these are not natural links and completely devalue them. Would it not be better to consolidate that time into 2.5-5hrs a week spent researching and writing a valuable, link-worthy, long-tail-rich post for the main blog and then promoting it in hopes of attracting natural links?
Link Building | | CMC-SD0 -
Blogger Outreach Tools
I am currently working on a few campaigns and initiatives which would be really good for blogger outreach.. Anyone used any of these services? http://www.grouphigh.com http://www.blogdash.com/ What's your thoughts?
Link Building | | EwanFisher0 -
Outsourced Backlinking?
Hello, I've been newly hired to head up a decent sized company's digital marketing initiatives. Between social media campaigns, web content development, ppc management, etc. I've been a bit overwhelmed. It looks like until my team gets a bit larger we may have to outsource link building, but with the new penguin update I'm worried about choosing the wrong company and ending up with a ton of spam links that gets us nailed. Does anyone happen to have any good recommendations? Thanks!
Link Building | | JFritton0 -
What's the real deal with nofollow
I had a few questions regarding nofollow links. It seems like more and more sites, forums, etc. nofollow their links. Is it still worth trying to get a link from? I've heard only Google takes nofollows into consideration. Do other search engines (Bing specifically) "listen" to nofollows? Finally, when checking for nofollow, does it need to be right by the link(s) or can it be anywhere in the source? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | DevonIntl0