Welcome to the best Free Backlink Checker!

Free Backlink Checker A free backlink checker is an immensely valuable tool for website owners and online marketers who are keen on evaluating and analyzing the effectiveness of their link building strategies. This innovative tool enables users to meticulously track and monitor the quality and quantity of backlinks that are pointing towards their esteemed website. By using this tool, website owners can conveniently gauge the success of their link building endeavors, identify areas for improvement, and optimize their overall SEO performance. With its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features, a free backlink checker is an indispensable asset for any website owner striving to enhance their online presence and garner higher search engine rankings. Get Instant Access to the tools: 100% Free

1. Introduction There are many benefits to using a backlink checker. First, it is a very simple and effective way to get information about your website links and also links of your competitors. This information can greatly increase your search engine ranking and also give you an advantage over your competition. It also gives you assurance that your links are the quality that you want them to be and that you are not being penalized for incorrect link building. Often people are unaware of the abundance of information that is provided in webmaster tools about their own site. This tool gives you the ability to collect similar information about your website and your competitor's website all in one central location. This information can be easily accessed and is up to date. Overall, it is a very effective tool to increase the success of your website and its marketing. The purpose of this tool is to give you information about the links to your website. This includes the type of your backlinks, the number of inbound and outbound links, the anchor text, page rank of the link, and any other specific details about the link. With this information, you can make sure that the link to your website is being done correctly. Incorrect link building can lead to search engine ranking penalties and lack of success. By comparing your current backlink information to previous information, you can monitor and measure your progress with your marketing and optimization. A backlink checker is a very useful tool for website owners. It reveals details about who is linking to your site and of course you want to know this information. It is very important for search engine optimization. Over the years, search engines have used quality and quantity of inbound links to a website as a key factor in its ranking. A site with a lot of high-quality inbound links will rank higher than an equal site with fewer links. Competitive analysis is another area where a backlink checker is a very useful tool. By using the backlink checker, you can determine where your competition is getting their links from. This information can lead you to pursue the same links and ideally get even more links than your competition. 1.1 Purpose of a Backlink Checker Backlink Checker Tool is an essential piece of kit, helping you track which sites are linking back to your own page and boosting the number of visitors to your site. If you're new to SEO or just curious what backlinks are, you should know that a backlink is a link back to your pages from another web page. The more backlinks the better. They are mainly used by search engines to rank the popularity of your site. Search engines, especially Google, are also known for taking note of how backlinks on a site are related to the content of your site and it has been said that the search engine looks at how valuable and relevant the backlinks are and then ranks your page according to this information. This is all designed to rank your pages in the search engines so ultimately the more related backlinks you have to your site, usually the higher your site will rank in the long run in the search engines. This is where a backlink checker tool can help you. By knowing these details you can work on your pages with better quality content and then start another linking campaign to increase the search engine rankings of said page. 1.2 Benefits of Using a Backlink Checker Crawl for errors: The term of digital marketing is now becoming an enormous platform for the companies to grow with a bit of investment. With the existence of other search engines or barter systems, the applications are made easily to reach through the blog or page. Whatever the product or description may be, a page will be needed to reach that for understanding the detailed content. Sometimes it may involve promoting the brands or products. The backlinks are provided within the content which navigates the user to the detail on an external page. The implementation of this backlinking ads will increase the revenue of the product based on hits and views. So the scenario is that the backlink should be given in good AI strategy mode. This helps to avoid errors with respect to the backing because it sometimes fails with redirection to an external page that is deleted or converted. So we can check the particular link whether it exists or is broken on the external page. This process will not affect the current page, and it also keeps track of the links that are required for our page. Now, backlink checking has been a crucial part of SEO optimization. This type of backlink tracking can be efficiently achieved by using Bloggingfrog's free backlink checker. Increased ranking: With a backlink checker, you can look at the backlinks of your site and that of your competitors. This will allow you to both a) replicate what is working and b) take action against what is not. For example, if your competitor has a backlink from a well-respected industry site, you can go after getting a backlink from the same site. Alternatively, if your website has spammy backlinks, you can use the disavow tool to make Google ignore them. Overall, the ability to look at the backlinks of your own site and others provides massive value. 2. Understanding Backlinks The last type of backlink is created using Anchor Text. An Anchor Text is the visible clickable text on a hyperlink. This will help to improve the ranking of the site for the keyword being entered. Now, with combined posting on blog comments and providing an anchor text link in content pointing to the site which is being commented, this will improve the search engine ranking for the specific keyword. There are two types of backlinks. The first is an Ad Hoc Backlink. This type of backlink is one that is created from a website to the other without any action being done by the owner of the site. An example of this would be a link on a post in a forum. If you are a member of the forum, you could have your URL in your signature, and as you post, the link would be created to your site. Backlinks can be referred to as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links. It is defined as incoming links to a website or a web page. They are the building blocks of good search engine optimization as the number of backlinks is considered as an index for the popularity of that site. When website A links to site B, site A is said to be giving a backlink to site B. 2.1 Definition of Backlinks The different search engines use backlinks in varying ways to provide relevance and importance to your site. By the use of an algorithm, search engines use the number of backlinks to a website as an indicator of the website's popularity and significance. Another way that search engines use backlinks is by evaluating the content of the source website. They do this by ascertaining what the content of the page linking to your site is about, and using that as a reference for your website's content. This can all have a positive or negative effect on your website's position in the search results. A backlink is a link on a webpage that is directed towards your website. The source of the link is trying to "link back" to your webpage. For example, if a website was creating a page detailing common myths about a particular topic, let's say alternative energy, they may link to your myth busting page that dispels these urban legends. This is a backlink from the myth site to your site. A backlink is an ideal way to point to the significance and merit of your website. With the many different websites and information portals on the internet today, it can be confusing to differentiate between credible and faulty sources. Sometimes the writing on a website may seem well written and credible, yet the content has no real merit and is just a compilation of information. One way to ascertain the validity of information on a website is through the use of backlinks. 2.2 Types of Backlinks Each backlink is different in terms of what it can do for your site. Anchor text: The anchor text of a backlink is the words that are clickable. These words are the ones that tell what the link is about. Branded anchor text is made up of the name of a business, with exact match anchor text being the same as the keyword that a business is trying to rank for. Both of these are an easy way for a site to be penalized by Google. .gov and .edu backlinks are those coming from government and educational sites. These types of sites are considered to be very credible, so the thought process is that a backlink from this type of site is of more value than others. This is not necessarily true, and backlinks can be hard to obtain from these sites. Finally, relevance is key. A backlink from a site with content that is related to your site is going to have higher value than one from a completely unrelated site. 2.3 Importance of Backlinks for SEO Backlinks are important for SEO because they act as vouchers for a website. Search engine algorithms consider the number of backlinks and the quality of the websites giving those backlinks to the main site. The more trustworthy and relevant the referring website, the more authority the search engines will give the main site. This builds the site's trust and authority which is a key asset in the war for higher search engine rankings and traffic. Essentially, the higher the trust and authority of the site to be optimized, the easier and quicker it will be to increase ranks and traffic from the targeted keywords. This is a result of the old adage "it's not what you know, it's who you know." Imagine taking on a new client. You may know a few people in the client's industry that can vouch for you and as a result, the client feels more confident in doing business with you. The same is true for websites. If visitors see the site as trustworthy due to the website's trust and authority within the market, visitors are more likely to become customers. Backlinks are instrumental in making this happen. On top of building trust and authority, backlinks are the most efficient way to index new content. If a site has a strong base of backlinks, every time new content is published, the chances of it being indexed are much higher compared to a site with very few backlinks. Time and money can be saved simply because the site will not have to manually index new content or rely on paying indexing services. 3. How a Backlink Checker Works Backlink checkers range drastically in the case of the quantity of knowledge that they supply. Some akin to these owned by Yahoo and Google are solely obtainable to the webmaster who owns the location. This is probably not seen as an web optimization software program instrument, because it doesn’t enable the webmaster to seek out out knowledge for different web sites. Different free checkers can have restricted info for an incoming hyperlink and there could also be cases the place the hyperlink is just not listed. Any again hyperlink checker ought to have the ability to report on the location rank of the originating URL, that is necessary as a result of it is going to decide the energy of the goal URL. We all know the PageRank is a key consider figuring out hyperlink energy. To get a backlink profile for an internet site, the backlink checker should crawl it as effectively as doable. This is the place the method can differ between completely different software program. Ideally, crawlers ought to simulate a consumer clicking on hyperlinks, and it will be a part of search engine bots in the best way that it should go to as many hyperlinks as doable. Google has its personal spider referred to as "Googlebot". This explicit spider makes use of a Google-particular algorithm which is actually a set of guidelines and formulation that decide how Googlebot will behave in numerous conditions. Though that is an intrinsic a part of Google, the essential idea or perform of a crawler is just like that of a backlink checker for a search engine. The method begins with crawling the online for backlinks. A crawler is a program that makes use of particular standards or algorithms to seek out and scan new info. Once we discuss a search engine crawler, we are able to liken this to an individual looking out the web for data. Spiders are what these crawlers are sometimes referred to, as a result of they’re all the time looking out and gathering info. The main function of a backlink checker is to supply a full hyperlink profile for any site, which could or will not be owned by the one who is utilizing the software program. That is the quite common function of a backlink checker, nevertheless, the way in which every completely different software program goes concerning the course of can differ fairly considerably. 3.1 Crawling and Indexing Backlinks The final step is data on anchor text. Research shows that the anchor text of a backlink is highly valuable. A backlink checker can determine the anchor text of a backlink using a simple script to extract this data from the page where the backlink is found. Once the checker has the anchor text data, it can once again store this in a database and associate it with each individual backlink. As long as the checker is continuously looking to update information as here, it will gradually build an effective picture of the value of each and every backlink. More data is gathered on backlinks by checking the PR (PageRank) of the page linking to the site. This data can be compiled using a PageRank checking tool, which will extract the PR of any given page. All the findings can be stored in a database, and PR can be associated with each backlink. Unchecked, a backlink has little value, so it's important that a backlink checker is constantly working to update and increase its information about backlinks. As shown above, a backlink's value is based on the link juice, i.e., how valuable the page linking to your site is, and by no-follow attribute backlinks do not pass on link juice. An effective way to judge the value of all backlinks is by recording which backlinks pass on link juice, and this can be done using a do-follow search. This is where a scraper will filter through every backlink and find out whether it is a do-follow or a no-follow link. This information can be stored in a database and associated with each individual backlink. Typically, all backlink checkers run a series of tests. The general process of how a backlink checker works is a scraper, which is an automated script that crawls the web. The scraper will query Yahoo Site Explorer to uncover a list of all the backlinks pointing to a specific domain. After the scraper has built a list of all the backlinks pointing to a domain, it will then seek to find more data on each of the backlinks. How a backlink checker works - Crawling and Indexing Backlinks 3.2 Analyzing Backlink Quality and Quantity When analyzing the quantity and quality of backlinks, the backlink checker will become quite involved with the website currently hosting the link. The following are various steps the checker may go through in an effort to determine link quality. Primarily, the backlink checker will determine the domain pagerank of the URL with the link. This will involve gathering information regarding the actual pagerank, so it's a good idea to check for the validity of the pagerank (to guard against faked PRs). It's likely that the checker may also store the history of the PR over time, so they can see if the page has had its PR manipulated in the past. Another factor in determining link quality would be to sift through any relevant information regarding the website and/or URL hosting the link. This might involve checking the category of the directory or page to see if it matches the source website, determine the language of the website, or extract keywords on the webpage in an effort to compare them to the keywords of the source site. Any information gathered here will likely be used to categorize and index the link for organizational purposes, as well as to filter out links of poor quality. 3.3 Detecting Broken or Toxic Backlinks After having generated the data on the backlinks, the software will return information regarding the link. The data will depend on the backlink checker and the information available through the internet for that specific URL. The backlink data will always return the title of the page. It will also return the anchor text that is used on the page. The anchor text is the words that are used within the link. The anchor text is what the search engine will use as a description of the page. This will help the search engine determine the content of the page and whether or not it is relevant to a person's search. Step 1 is crucial. A backlink analysis program works by going through the whole site and all of its content. This is important because the backlink will only be valuable if the content of the page is related to the content of your page. The software should also return information on what the backlink is actually on. For instance, some backlinks are just URL links. A URL link will take a person to a specific page. Other backlinks might be on an image or a clickable stated or flash object. This is important as search engines tend to give preference to HTML coded links. If a backlink is on an image, it is often the case that the image is representative of the site being linked to. In this situation, the backlink would not be relevant to the content on your site. Flash objects and other code can have similar effects, so it is important to note what the backlink is on. Finally, the data will return useful information for the backlink URL. This information will be the backlink URL's PR. This is important as the linked page's PR will have an effect on the newly generated backlink. If the PR of the backlink URL is N/A or zero, then the newly generated backlink will not obtain the benefits of that PR. The PR of the backlink URL will also have an effect on the backlink's durability. 4. Features of a Free Backlink Checker In order to know which specific anchor text is providing the best results, you must use a backlink checker that provides this information. Some links can be detrimental to your SEO efforts, so it can be crucial to check the worth of the link building activities. A quality link building activity is anything that builds a link that is searchable by a specific keyword phrase. High-quality links contribute to higher rankings as well as increased search engine ranking position (SERP) for the specific keyword. The use of high-quality anchor text can raise the percentage of the search engine ranking position for the linked page. With recent changes to the Google search algorithms, cheap and excessive link building has caused many to lose search engine rankings, anchor text analysis is now an essential part of today's SEO link building efforts. This is also an extremely useful way of monitoring the backlink building efforts of your SEO company. It can be the difference between telling your SEO company "great work!" or "you're fired". If you're firing an SEO company and they've done good work, it's crucial to remember that you may want to remove and disavow any spammy links built for your site. This information can be forgotten or lost, so make sure it's kept an eye on at regular intervals. With this info at hand, backlink analysis can be used to compare your backlink profile to that of your competitors. This can also be used as a good way of gauging how good/bad the SEO company you hired has been. A simple SEO tactic of mine is to check and compare the quality of my backlinks to those of specific competitors, it can save money on link building and get to the good links faster. A solid SEO tool for link building is also an effective way to gain high search engine rankings. When you're looking into a free backlink checker, one of the first features you'll likely come across is backlink monitoring and tracking. This is the core function of any backlink checker and it's an essential feature. With this, you can keep tabs on your backlinks and see if they're still linking back to your site, if they've been removed completely, or if they've become broken. This can be vital information for any webmaster as broken backlinks can be harmful to your site as well as your link building efforts. A site's broken backlinks and the exact location of the referring backlink page information is useful when you want to clean up your backlink profile. 4.1 Backlink Monitoring and Tracking Now, tracking each link and its value, whether it be positive or negative, can be a tough task. This is the reason why our tool then tries to assess the value of each link to see if the page rank of your website has been increased because of it. This can be difficult to see, however, and requires a manual check of each link. So, any link that is not helping to improve the page rank would probably be deemed as a waste of time. For negative backlinks that have been placed there in an attempt to lower the page rank, the Free Backlink Checker has a Disavow File Creator which can be submitted to Google in order to ignore these specific links. Monitoring the backlinks that you have associated with your website has never been easier once you have the correct tools within your reach. The Free Backlink Checker does this seamlessly with no fuss, displaying a list of all the backlinks associated with your website, whether they have come from an external site or whether one of your backlinks has been used to try and increase a page rank. All of these can be tracked. After the backlinks have been retrieved, they are then displayed in a list format. These days, building backlinks to a website is of the utmost importance and is the reason why it helps with improving a website's search engine ranking. With backlink building being at the forefront of any website owner, the need to monitor these backlinks and to track and assess the value and status of this link, whether it is positive or negative, is now paramount. 4.2 Competitor Analysis Discovering who is connecting to your competitors is a basic step in building your own foundation. This can be done by performing a backlink check. As you try to determine where your competitor is getting content and who is providing it, you will likely find more links when you check the links that point to their content. Link exchange and the use of article directories or ghostwritten content are common methods used by others to establish a pathway to the competitor's content. If this is the case, you need to find out which articles are being used and whether the links are of high value. Often, it is possible to access and analyze the URLs of your competitor's content that are being linked to from other sites. This can be done with an Internet Explorer tool, which is quite effective. However, using the FTP function, including the domain name being developed, can often leave a trail that risks duplicate content issues and legal consequences. 4.3 Anchor Text Analysis Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It is visibly different from the URL and should be descriptive in nature to the page it is linking to. Anchor text analysis involves finding the frequency of specific words or phrases in an entire site, page or a set of pages to identify which words are used as anchor text more frequently. This is useful to help identify if the site has a specific keyword strategy that it is attempting to have more heavily linked areas to rank for specific keywords. In this way, anchor text analysis can also be a contributing factor to link relevance. This will not only give you insight into your own strategy to see if you are making an intentional effort to impact specific keywords, but will give you a high-level view of top keywords being linked to your site. This is also useful to compare against competitors to see how their keyword strategies might differ from your own. Any word that appears as anchor text less often than you would expect is under-represented; a higher frequency than expected indicates over-representation. To conduct the analysis, you compile a list of all anchor text phrases and their frequencies and compare it to an expected frequency for each phrase. This can be calculated by taking the total number of anchor text phrases containing a specific word and dividing by the total number of anchor text phrases. The simplest way to understand expected and observed frequency is the case of the coins. If 80% of all coins are quarters, then the probability of drawing a quarter is quite high. The expected value and the observed can then be compared in this example by seeing if the number of quarters drawn is close to 80%. This can be calculated with a formula to arrive at a value for each word. High deviation values are strong indicators of under or over-representation. 4.4 Domain Authority Evaluation A great way to check at a glance whether your backlink is on a high DA site is by looking at the visual "weight" of the backlink. Do this by sorting your backlinks using the domain authority. If any of your backlinks are of low quality and on a site with a low DA, it may be indicative of your search engine ranking and you should consider removing them. Moving forward, you may want to use backlink building techniques to get your website on a high DA site to increase your site's ranking. Domain authority (DA) is a measure of the power of a domain name and is one of the search engine ranking factors. High DA means high search engine rank, and vice versa. Most free backlink checkers display the results in the form of a DA bar where they show existing backlinks of the website and the domain authority of the web page. It is essential to one's SEO to know how this relates to your website. Often, a high DA site will be ranking well on the search engine result pages, and if your website has a backlink on this site, it is possible that you could also rank well for your keyword. 5. Choosing the Right Free Backlink Checker Finally, the report generated is where certain tools can really shine. Step-by-step is useless if the information, even if it is some of the best available, is not interpreted correctly. A clear understanding of what the links say about your site is what separates the best from the rest. Assessing the usability of a tool and its report is a subjective analysis, but there are measurable factors that can be considered. The first is the speed of the tool itself. Older tools may still rely on building databases, which can take a few seconds or even weeks to generate results. State-of-the-art software is often real-time, enabling some of the fastest analysis on currently indexed links. The size of the database searched is also a factor to consider, as some backlink checkers may be limited while others can search billions. Faster tools are obviously desirable, but the ability to store more data often has the most significant impact. Step-by-step comprehensive results can be obtained with large-scale database queries. Experience addressing issues with the organization or exploration of unnatural connections might be useful, yet everything relies on having a solid understanding of what a good connection profile looks like. This isn't a quality that can be achieved easily, as many SEOs find through trial and error, often leading to disappointment. The cost of working on bad connection profiles is high, both in terms of time and potentially damaging search engine rankings. This makes the specific information provided by one backlink checker to another significant. Pricing can vary significantly, with free tools often providing some level of information and others requiring a subscription. It is a good idea to test a few providers on a trial basis before committing to a paid subscription. This can often be one of the best ways to determine if a particular tool is right for you. Time scales on subscriptions vary, with some providers offering a month while others require a year in advance. It is also a good idea to check if there is an automatic subscription, as it is often easy to forget to cancel membership, resulting in unnecessary costs. 5.1 Evaluating Accuracy and Reliability There are several different ways to evaluate the backlink data that a free backlink checker provides. On the most basic level, you can check the age of the backlinks. Typically, SEOs feel that the older the link, the more valuable it will be. New and upcoming sites can sometimes slip under the radar, or be temporarily or permanently ignored by highly ranked sites. This means that new links are frequently underrepresented in search engine indexes. Another school of thought is that the higher the page rank of the page the link is on, the more valuable it will be. If this is your only criteria for evaluating backlink data, an inline backlink checker filter allows you to do it quickly. The drawbacks to this method are that Page Rank is highly volatile and often inaccurate. There are frequent and sometimes dramatic changes in pages' rank as calculated and updated by Google. Also, Page Rank is a site wide score and does not actually indicate the strength of the link to an individual page. It is possible to get a rough approximation using the. The most reliable way to evaluate a backlink is simply by looking at the link itself. Direct traffic and search engine rankings are the ultimate measure of a link, but analyzing the anchor text and URL can give a strong indication of a link's value. Judging by the descriptive text provided by the backlink checker, the tool should provide some indication about how the data was gathered and its reliability. For example, "Our list of backlinks is the best available, and is frequently and manually updated." might be a somewhat arrogant claim, but it gives an indication of the quality and freshness of the data. Unfortunately, this data must be taken with a grain of salt, as the thesauruses of the world are well known for their propensity to engage in data fabrication and white hat conspiracy. Finally, the most reliable way to evaluate a backlink checker tool is through your own direct comparison and analysis with other tools and webmaster's site data. This brings us up to a discussion on correlation and data accuracy between different backlink checker tools. 5.2 User-Friendly Interface and Reporting One tool may be more preferable to another depending on the insight offered. For many, the user-friendly interface is essential and the way in which the data is reported may also be of importance. A search and replace function is always desirable, and the options to export the data and schedule automatic reports could also be useful to some. The volume of data the tool is able to report and how insights are displayed with visualization could also be of significance to you. Consider what your primary reason for using a backlink checker is and what you are hoping to gain from the data. A recent study by Micrositemasters.com found that the top 6 backlink checker tools in terms of MajesticSEO backlink index data (which is one easy way to evaluate the accuracy of the data) all employ unique methodologies to acquire said backlink data. The study concluded that rather than declaring one tool to be the most accurate, users should know which tool is best for the job in hand. There are so many free backlink checkers to choose from, it can be a difficult choice. The popular options are often selected because multiple people are looking for them. The question is, how reliable are these tools and what methodology are they employing to offer the free service? Ideally, you are looking for an independent tool which will give an honest representation of your backlinks. Typically, if the tool is being offered by a company, it is merely an advert for their paid service and may not provide useful results. 5.3 Integration with Other SEO Tools Backlink analysis is just one component of a larger SEO analytics picture. If the tool limits you to only a small slice of the picture, it is not a good value. The resource of a backlink tool may be wasted if the tool is used in isolation. The link building team will need access to other SEO data to do their job. Relying on the backlink data from one source, even if it is a source as large as Majestic, is still not enough information. A successful link building campaign needs to know how their backlink profile looks compared to competitors. It needs to know where their competitors are getting their links from. This data is available from various sources and an effective link building campaign will collect information from many sources. If the free backlink checker is part of an SEO suite, it may provide enough value on its own. If not, look at the integration it has with other tools. Sometimes a backlink tool has limited features and functionality through the website user interface, but has full access to powerful data via an API. Check with the provider as to what is possible with the data. If there is no API access, there may be an option to manually upload and import data from a CSV file. This is a last resort idea and if all else fails, just remember that cutting and pasting URL data with a free tool is still better than paying a human to do it. 6. Benefits of Using a Free Backlink Checker This is one of the most obvious and common reasons to use a backlink checker. Backlinks have a significant impact on your search engine rankings, so it is very important to know where your backlinks are coming from. Quality backlinks are like votes for your site; getting a variety of high quality backlinks is good, whereas getting a load of poor quality, spammy type backlinks is bad. By using a backlink checker, you can identify where your competitors are getting backlinks from and you can try to get backlinks from the same places. You can also see which anchor texts are being used for the backlinks. The anchor text is the words that are clickable in a hyperlink. Using relevant keywords in the anchor text is an indication of what the landing page is about. This will be looked upon favorably by search engines. So if you have a specific keyword in mind that you want to rank for, you can compare your backlink anchor texts to the anchor texts of the top ranking sites for that keyword. If there is a discrepancy, then you know what you need to do. 6.1 Improving SEO Performance Even if your website has been around for a while and it has never had any SEO work performed on it, then you may find that there could be quite a lot of work to be carried out in terms of on-page optimization. SEO has two main areas, on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is the more straightforward process of the two and involves optimizing the actual page content in an effort to make it relevant to the search terms being targeted. Off-page optimization is the process of building inbound links. Your link is your URL posted on someone else's website which is when clicked, takes the user to your website. The inbound link is the most important factor when attaining a highly ranked listing on search engines. This is because search engines place a lot of value on inbound links, as they are essentially like votes for your website, and they are seen as being a good way to measure the relevance of a webpage to a search term. It is this in mind that has led to the explosion of link building services all over the World Wide Web. Many people are now aware of the relevance of inbound links and want to take shortcuts to attaining them. 6.2 Identifying Link Building Opportunities When using a free backlink tracker, link building opportunities could be found. Everyone's aim should be to raise the calibre of the websites in their market. Top ranking websites are often the most informative. They have the most content, the most links pointing to them, and because of their content and link popularity, have generated one of the most targeting traffic. In targeting these high quality sites you are aiming to get some of their traffic to come to your site. It's really hard to convince other high quality sites to link to your site in the beginning because it will not be beneficial to them. It's important to foster a relationship where you can inform them about the benefits of linking to your site. If you can somehow have them link to your site with a short explanation about why it is beneficial to their readers, you will be able to generate a large amount of targeted traffic. An example of this would be if you had an informative article on another webpage explaining the health benefits of drinking green tea, you would want to begin linking with sites that sell green tea so that their readers being informed about green tea would be potential customers. Another possible link building opportunity that can be found with free backlinks tracker is that often times the most powerful tool or content on a competitor's site has no links pointing to it. This is usually because it was overlooked by the new site with hopes of targeting the best of the content or it may have been implemented after the site has already become popular. Link building is important either way you are able to change the text that describes the link. If your URL is not very informative or does not properly target the site that it is linking to, you can have it changed. This is also true for anchor text. By changing this you will improve the relevancy and quality of the link. Through checking the backlinks of the site you are linking to, you can make sure that these changes have been implemented. 6.3 Monitoring Backlink Health By using the free backlink checker tool, a webmaster can now monitor the health of backlinks by gaining insight into which backlinks are increasing the site's popularity and which attempt to damage the website. A complete analysis of backlinks can be gathered, and through the use of the competitors compare URL tool, a webmaster can also measure the backlink success of their site against others within the same market. After building backlinks to your website, the most important (and often overlooked) task is that of monitoring backlink health. With the array of spam tactics and link building strategies, sometimes a webmaster can find that his website's backlink development has left its site penalized by search engines. This is the exact opposite of what should have been achieved and can be detrimental to a site in terms of search engine traffic. It is therefore imperative that backlink health is checked on a frequent basis. 7. Limitations of Free Backlink Checkers SEOMoz, a popular SEO website and home of the Linkscape tool, limits free backlink data to 1000 links. It's a very small portion of the amount of backlinks for a website, and could therefore be seen as a way of masking the amount of data available in order to encourage the purchase of a full subscription. Similar patterns could be seen with backlink tools from SEO Spyglass and Raven. MajesticSEO provides a similar tactic by limiting the data range and number of results for any free use of their backlink tool. Step to a new tool from Cognitive SEO while still at least providing a "lite" version of their full paid product, removes the ability to analyze backlinks for free entirely. These progressions in limitations of free backlink tools represent the desire to push users towards purchasing a full subscription during a time where many SEOs may be looking to cut costs due to the global economic climate. When considering the limitations of free backlink checkers, it's important to remember that it may be in the best interests of the owner of the backlink analysis tool to limit the scope of the free service in order to encourage you to purchase a full subscription or to use their other services. For SEOMoz and MajesticSEO, the free services are limited in comparison to the paid versions, whereas a new tool like the Backlink Watch seems to offer more features for free. 7.1 Limited Access to Advanced Features An example of a limited feature is the inability to check backlinks deep to a specific URL. This can be an annoyance to the user and may be the reason that forces the user to buy link checking software. Free backlink checkers are acceptable for a casual check of backlinks to your own site or a competitor's site. However, if backlinks and increasing search engine rankings are a serious task for you, it may be worth investing in link checking software. Free checkers are also more likely to be a backlink checker tool rather than software. A web-based tool can be very restrictive and, in most cases, will require you to disable pop-up blockers and things such as ActiveX. This is where the title "you get what you pay for" comes into play. Free software is almost always a better and more reliable solution compared to an online tool. Free tools are limited to the number of times you can use them and the number of features you can use. Software is a one-off purchase and usually comes with free lifetime updates and free technical support. Now back to the subject of distinguishing between good and bad backlinks. Some backlink checkers do not have the ability to do this as the database they use may not support the feature. Static or cached data is data that is out of date. Cost-free backlink checkers often use cached data, which is a great disadvantage to the website. Cached data can be a few days to a few weeks old, and it is the last thing you would want to use when trying to improve search engine rankings. High-ranking websites are increasing their backlink incoming links every day, so the backlink checkers' data will never be up to date. A limitation of a backlink checker is the inability to filter and distinguish between good backlinks and bad backlinks. This is an important factor when trying to increase search engine rankings. By focusing on the bad backlinks, this can have a negative effect on your website's ranking. This isn't to say that you should try and remove all backlinks to your site with a backlink anchor text match to your target keywords. This is far too risky and can be seen as unnatural link building. Instead, you should attempt to increase the amount of backlinks with keyword-relevant anchor text. As touched upon briefly in the introduction, many free backlink checkers face limitations in terms of features, accuracy, and the number of backlinks they can check. A backlink is a link from a third-party webpage to a page on your website. There are other terms for backlinks, such as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links. What a backlink is does not change; what changes is the term used to describe it. Step one to increasing your search engine rankings is to know the current situation. This requires checking the amount and quality of backlinks to your site and also the backlinks to your competitors. 7.2 Potential Inaccuracies in Data Although the data provided with free backlink checkers is often inaccurate, this does not mean that it is useless. A common method of link building is to check your competitors' backlinks and try to replicate the ones that are effective at increasing search engine ranking. This type of analysis can still be done fairly accurately with a free checker, and in regards to the small business owner, a free checker can be perfectly adequate for monitoring your website's performance and the sites which are linking towards your domain. The backlink checkers that search engine optimization companies use are often far more powerful. A backlink checker such as Linkdex has a much larger index of the internet than the free tools available to the general public, therefore Linkdex is able to provide a larger quantity of data when checking backlinks. This in turn means that there is more accurate data from free backlink checkers, as with their power disadvantage they cannot reach as deep a level of analysis. The data obtained while using a backlink checker, especially a free one, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Free backlink checkers are far from being able to check the backlinks to the very last page and determine the amount of inbound links to the website, so using the data obtained from here needs to be managed carefully. Data inaccuracies exist for a wide range of reasons, with the main reasons often being a large number of backlinks from one domain, or a large number of duplicate links. 7.3 Restrictions on Number of URLs or Backlinks This will bring up a detailed analysis of the domain and it is only the data here that you can access for free. This is a good way to get potential free backlink data from SEO Spyglass, but the fact that this program is using a free version of another service means that there are limitations in the usefulness of the data you will get. SEO Spyglass is the only free tool that I am aware of that will allow you to access all the data for free. It gives you a detailed list of all the backlinks it finds for a domain, but you have to do a bit of digging to find the free data. When you run a search, there are many tabs and it is on the backlinks tab where you will find a "site explorer" button that you need to click on to see the data. Another common restriction of free backlink checkers is the amount of data a user can access. Both Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer have free versions of their services. Each one has a limit on the amount of data you can access about the sites you are checking. This may not be a problem for you now, but if you ever decide to run a backlink checking campaign or use a backlink tool in the future, this will be an issue because these tools extract their data from these services. 8. Tips for Using a Free Backlink Checker Effectively Analysis of an ongoing campaign is crucial to formulating a strong strategy. Tools that provide data on a monthly basis are favored as it can take an average of 4-6 months to see any notable movement in the SERPs. Depending on the level of competition for a specific term, it may take even longer. Without regular and accurate data, it's impossible to assess whether or not your campaign is having a positive effect. The accuracy of data can vary; linking data is notoriously hard to obtain and can often be inaccurate or out of date. Therefore, it is important that the data is checked for reliability. This can mean cross-referencing data from two tools, or from a tool such as Majestic SEO which provides data on links they have identified as "recently seen". 8.1 Regular Monitoring and Analysis When using a backlink checker, it's important to always put your SEO hat on. There are things you can do with a backlink analysis that you can't do with any other segment of SEO. Often, the competitive nature of backlink analysis and the need to see a clear picture of what is holding back/ranking up in SERPs will justify the need for more than one tool. This is one of those tasks where the right tool really makes a difference. 8.1 Regular Monitoring and Analysis 'nofollow' backlinks are built using HTML code that contains a piece of code similar to this: rel="nofollow". Essentially, it means that the destination website is telling the search engine to not pass on its page rank or reputation to the source of the backlink. This has a detrimental effect because it essentially negates the backlink as if it wasn't even there. Many free backlink checkers are available that will help you identify if your backlinks are of the nofollow variety; provided SEO is one of your goals. To effectively build a strong and successful online business, regularly monitoring backlinks is vital. There are various ways to monitor your backlinks, but for the purpose of this article, I'll discuss backlink analysis (after all, this is a backlink checker tool!). There are numerous benefits to knowing which backlinks are the best for your site. Whether it be the ability to replicate successful links and build new ones that are similar, or the knowledge that certain link building techniques are not yielding good results and should be avoided. Before delving into the specific benefits of backlink analysis, it is important to understand what makes a 'good' link. 8.2 Setting Goals and Tracking Progress Setting goals can be a very revealing exercise, as it forces you to evaluate the value of SEO and link building for your site. Remember that any goal involving your own site should be directly related to the impact the changes will have on your business. If the sole objective is to increase traffic, it is usually better to allocate resources to paid advertising. An accurate assessment of link building potential compared to other forms of web marketing can save a lot of wasted time and effort. Setting goals and tracking progress is crucial to any long-term marketing activity, and link building is no exception. The trouble with link building is that it is a time-intensive exercise; if you don't set targets, it is all too easy to sidestep measured progression in favor of erratic and poorly coordinated effort. Establishing a set of quantifiable objectives will allow you to focus your mind and your work and is vital to the planning process. A goal can be anything from the number of links acquired to a boost in a particular ranking. It can also be a target to acquire linkable assets or content on your site. 8.3 Taking Action on Backlink Insights Developing new strategic partnerships with other websites is a common result of backlink analysis. You may find that your site and another non-competitive site within your industry are a great match for exchanging links. You should be looking to discover new high-quality inbound link opportunities for your site. Often times with this research, you will find that many of your competitors are obtaining links from the same sites. This provides you with an excellent opportunity to learn why that site is linking to your competitor and not you. This is a prime opportunity to establish a link for your site as well. On the flip side, you may also discover that some of your competitors are obtaining links from some really shady and irrelevant sites. This knowledge can help you avoid potential penalties from low-quality link building. Once you have a good idea of how your backlink profile looks, as well as that of your competitors, you can begin to use this information to your advantage. The main reason for doing backlink analysis is to help you gain a competitive advantage. You can use these insights to begin to build, rebuild, and/or remove links. This will eventually help improve your search engine rankings and traffic. Below, you will find several ways to take action on the insights you've gained. 9. Conclusion It's a recommended tool for every website. Using this tool frequently will give you a competitor edge. This tool should be used to perform backlink check on your website backlinks and analyze it. You should compare your backlinks with competitor's backlinks and try to get more good quality backlinks than your competitor. This is a long process but in the end it's rewarding. And higher the backlink quality, better will be your website search engine rankings. This is also a beneficial tool for website owners. Website owners should be aware of the backlinks to their websites. Most of the time, they didn't have a clue about the backlinks that were being generated to their website. Sometimes they are unaware about the fact that the link to their website is a do-follow or a no-follow link. It's very important that all backlinks are from reputable sources. You can use this tool to get an idea about your website backlinks. You can check backlink of your competitor and compare it with your own. Here, in this free backlink checker, we are trying to make the process of backlink checking a lot easier and efficient. We have created this tool to be used by SEO enthusiasts who can use this tool for competitor analysis often. They can use this tool to get all the backlinks of their competitor and try to get the similar ones. This is done by all SEOs to get higher rankings on search engines. SEOs can check their backlinks and get an idea about from where they are getting backlinks, either good or bad. Nowadays this is overused with the word called "backlink spamming". To avoid penalty from search engine, it's imperative to know the quality of backlinks. And the tool is a great help for this purpose.