How To Monitor Backlinks In 2024: 7 Best Methods & Tools

Why Monitor Backlinks?

An obvious reason why you should monitor backlinks is to know when someone links to your site. This can be especially useful if you’re paying for links and want to check if and when you actually received them. 

But even if you aren’t paying for backlinks, it’s still useful to know when someone links to you in case you want to thank them or check what they’re saying about you. 

Additionally, link monitoring also has three less obvious benefits. It will help you:

• Catch spammy links faster.
• Replace lost links faster. 
• Steal your competitors’ backlinks.

Let’s discuss these benefits in more depth. 

1. Catch Spammy Links Faster

Spammy backlinks, also called toxic links, are links that are low in quality, irrelevant to your site, and/or come from untrusted sources such as link farms, directories, and otherwise spammy websites. 

For example:

• Links that point to a finance site from low-quality sites about health and wellness to a site could be deemed spammy. 
• Links from sites that openly sell links or link to many irrelevant sites could be considered spammy, too. 

Google can penalize sites with spammy backlinks, as they violate the search engine’s quality guidelines. That’s why SEO experts recommend regularly checking your backlink profile for toxic links and disavowing them.

Now for the full disclosure: there’s an ongoing debate about whether spammy backlinks negatively impact SEO. Google has come out multiple times saying there’s “no such thing as toxic links,” and that they don’t penalize sites that have them.

On the other hand, many companies conducted their own studies and unequivocally showed that toxic links do indeed hurt search engine optimization (SEO). For example, SEMRush’s analysis shows that Google penalizes unnatural inbound links, especially:

• Sponsored or paid links
• Guest posts and press releases
• Links coming from PBNs and public networks

So, what’s the real truth? Does Google penalize sites with spammy links?

The most likely scenario is that Google doesn’t penalize sites with a limited number of spammy backlinks but does take action against sites with heaps of such backlinks. That’s why it’s recommended you continuously check your backlink profile and prevent a buildup of toxic links.  

2. Replace Lost Links Faster

There are many reasons why you could lose backlinks over time. Some of the most common reasons are as follows:

• The referring domain no longer works. 
• Webmasters removed your links from their sites.
• The referring page is deleted.
• The referring website was redesigned. 
• 500 error (internal server error) occurred on your referring domain. 

The faster you realize you’ve lost backlinks, the faster you can recover them. Monitoring your website backlinks can help you with this and, consequently, help you reduce the number of backlinks you lose without noticing.

3. Steal Your Competitors’ Backlinks

When trying to “steal” your competitors’ backlinks, you won’t be monitoring your own but rather your competitors’ backlink profiles. This is often called competitor analysis and can be the backbone of your next link building campaign. 

Competitor analysis helps you identify sites that are highly likely to link to you as they’ve already shown interest in your niche by linking to your competitors. This means that analyzing your competitors can help you identify easy link building opportunities.

The key here is to regularly monitor your competitors’ backlinks, so you can identify their new links as soon as they’re created. We’ll discuss which tools you can use for this purpose in a minute.

What To Monitor

You always want to monitor two key things: the number and quality of backlinks. 

The former is straightforward. You generally want to have as many backlinks as possible. If you notice your numbers are dropping, you should work on recovering lost backlinks or building new ones. 

The latter, however, is slightly more complicated. Sure; you always want to shoot for the highest-quality backlinks, as the quality directly impacts your keyword rankings. But how do you assess link quality? 

To do so, you can analyze several link aspects, such as: 

• Nofollow vs dofollow tag: Dofollow links are higher quality than nofollow links. They show that the source site trusts the target site and, consequently, have a bigger impact on the target site’s rankings and visibility.
• Anchor text: Descriptive anchor phrases give search engines context about the linked page and help them understand it. In contrast, non-descriptive anchor texts like “click here” provide little to no useful context, which reduces their impact on how the linked page ranks.
• Referring domain authority: Links from high-authority domains are more valuable than links from low-authority domains, as they have more credibility with search engines.

The highest-quality links would, then, be tagged as dofollow, have descriptive anchors, and come from domains with high authority. If the majority of your links meet at least some of these requirements, you have a high-quality backlink profile. On the other hand, if most of your links don’t fulfill these criteria, create a strategy that will let you build higher-quality links.

Additionally, you may also want to monitor your competitors’ backlinks—not just yours.

How To Monitor Backlinks In 2024

You can monitor backlinks using free methods, all-in-one SEO tools, like Ahrefs, or more specialized backlink monitoring tools. We’ll suggest the best tools from each category below.

Free Tools & Methods

Let’s kick things off with some free ways to monitor your backlinks.

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is the most accurate source of information about your site. Besides other relevant insights, it can give you a solid overview of your internal and external links. Plus, unlike other backlink tools on this list, it’s free.

To find information about your backlinks within GSC, click “Links” in the right-hand menu.

This will open a new page with link-related information about your site. To check your backlinks, you want to look at the data under “External links.” Here, you’ll be able to see the following three pieces of information: 

• Top linked pages — Pages on your site that other sites are linking to.
• Top linking sites — Sites that link to yours.
• Top linking text — Anchor phrases that link to your site.

GSC also lets you disavow spammy backlinks if you go to this page.

✔️ The biggest advantage of using GSC to monitor your backlinks is that you can use it for free. Plus, no third-party tool can ever be as accurate as GSC.

❌ However, its biggest disadvantage is that it offers very limited data. For example, it doesn’t show you which exact pages are linking to you—only which sites. It also doesn’t let you do other things you may want to do, like monitor your competitors’ backlinks.

2. Google Search

Another—more flawed and more limited—way to check your backlinks is to use Google Search. From there, you can copy and paste the exact URL that should be pointing to your site. Then, check the first (few) search results and see if a link to your site shows up there. 

• ‍For example, if we did a Google search for https://weworkremotely.com/company/prestigelinks, we’d find a page linking to our website. 

❌ However, this method presumes that you already know where your backlinks are coming from. It can be useful if you’re actively building links and know in advance where your partners will place them. But it’s not valuable in terms of:

• discovering new backlinks you’re not aware of,
• identifying lost backlinks, or
• analyzing existing backlinks to your site.

The second method comes down to typing in a specific keyword that you believe someone could use as an anchor phrase linking to your site. The most probable keyword/anchor phrase would be your brand name. 

In our case, that would mean googling “prestigelinks” or "prestige links."

You can also do a search using a Google search operator (read: special command) to filter out as many irrelevant results as possible: 

• intitle:yoururl.com

❌ There are several similar problems with this method.

Firstly, you’ll get very limited and often irrelevant data. Secondly, you may find pages that do mention you but not link to you. In that case, you’re not actually finding backlinks—but you may find unlinked brand mentions that you can turn into links via outreach.

Link Monitoring Tools

As you can probably tell by now, monitoring your (or your competitors’) links will be near impossible without using tools. The first group of tools you can use are, of course, specialized link monitoring tools—like Linkody or MonitorBacklinks.com.

3. Linkody

Linkody is a specialized backlink tool that automatically monitors your backlinks and notifies you of any changes, such as new backlinks you’ve gained or the backlinks you’ve lost.

It comes packed with useful link-related features, such as:

• Links — A list of all your backlinks with an in-depth overview of the main link features, such as source links, the Moz DA score for the source domain, anchor text, and target page.
• Disavow — Lets you select spammy links you want to disavow.
• Google index status — Shows you if your backlinks are indexed by Google.
• Competitors — Shows all your competitors’ links along with other link features, like the Moz DA score, anchor text, and target page.

Linkody is a paid tool, but its affordable price (10.50€/month if paid annually) makes it a good choice for those who want a more in-depth analysis of their backlinks without breaking the bank.

4. SEOptimer / MonitorBacklinks

SEOptimer is another comprehensive SEO platform that recently acquired a popular standalone backlink monitoring tool, MonitorBacklinks.com. If you prefer to use MonitorBacklinks.com exclusively, you can still do so here, or you can use SEOptimer for additional SEO insights.  

Monitor Backlinks comes with many useful link monitoring features that, among other things, let you:

• Monitor your site for new and lost links
• Check your competitors’ backlinks
• Disavow spammy backlinks
• See your top anchor phrases

MonitorBacklinks.com typically gets great reviews. Many people prefer it over more comprehensive SEO tools, like Semrush or Ahrefs, because of its laser focus on link analysis and link building.

All-In-One Tools That You Can Use To Monitor Backlinks

Finally, let’s go over some popular all-in-one SEO tools that also let you monitor backlinks.

5. Ahrefs

Although some people don’t like using (or paying for!) more comprehensive SEO platforms to exclusively monitor their backlinks, this list wouldn’t be complete without Ahrefs.

Ahrefs is one of the most reliable all-in-one SEO platforms out there and, arguably, has more data than most similar products. A survey from 2022, for example, found that Ahrefs is the most popular tool for link building among expert SEOs. Ahrefs also claims to have 28,9 billion keywords in its database. 

So, if you are willing to invest in a more comprehensive tool, Ahrefs is a great choice. When it comes to monitoring your backlinks, here are a few things you can do with Ahrefs:

• Set up email alerts and get notified whenever your or your competitors’ sites gain new backlinks or lose existing ones
• Check your competitors’ backlinks and find sites that are linking to multiple competitors, but not to you (read: find easy link building opportunities)
• Monitor the entire web for mentions of your brand in order to turn unlinked brand mentions into links
• Find anchor phrases pointing to your or your competitors’ sites
• Identify broken backlinks
• See all your/competitors’ backlinks at a glance, together with useful link metrics

P.S. Ahrefs also has a free version of their premium Backlink Checker tool. You can use it to get some basic metrics on your backlink profile and identify some of your backlinks.

6. Semrush

Semrush is another comprehensive SEO tool. Some prefer it over Ahrefs; others consider it to be their second favorite. Either way, there’s no denying that Semrush is one of the most trusted tools for link building, content marketing, and SEO in general.

It also has a good amount of link monitoring features. With them, you can:

• Easily get the most important metrics on any site’s backlink profile, such as the number of links and referring domains
• Get insights into a myriad of link metrics, such as whether they’re dofollow or nofollow, if the link is coming from an image, text, or another media, etc. 
• Audit your backlinks and identify the ones that are potentially spammy, broken, etc.

Of course, keep in mind that Semrush gives you access to many more features—both link monitoring and other features. 

7. MOZ

Moz is a comprehensive all-in-one SEO software with a dedicated link analysis tool called Link Explorer. The tool comes with a multitude of useful link monitoring features, but we’ll mention only three:

• Inbound Links — Shows you all your backlinks, their anchor texts and spam scores, the DA of the linking domain, and other link features.
• Link Intersect — Lets you compare your domain to your competitors’ and find websites that are linking to them but not to you. 
• Discovered and Lost — Lets you see the links you’ve recently lost and gained at a glance.

Moz is great for anyone looking to monitor their links, but also improve their overall SEO and find new link building opportunities. However, we’d personally choose Semrush or Ahrefs over Moz.

Build Links With Expert Help 

Don’t forget the most important aspect of every link building strategy: actually building links. 

If doing so yourself is too challenging or time-consuming, you may be interested in working with our link building agency. Set up a meeting to browse through our list of partner sites before deciding if you want to work with us, or order your first batch of links now.