Regarding Search Engine Optimization, much has changed over the last couple of years. But backlinks and related aspects remain almost the same, even though there has been changes in the search engine algorithms. Previously, having a lot of backlinks regardless of their quality was considered a good SEO practice. Since the Penguin algorithm update happened in Google search, everything has changed. Now the crawlers look for the quality of the backlinks and that is why it is very important to have links to websites with a certain standard. Checking every single dofollow link manually is very troublesome, to make that job easier there are plenty of Backlink checking tools for SEO professionals. Here are brief reviews on 5 of them.
1. SEMRUSH
SEMRUSH has been widely popular with SEO professionals for a quite long period of time. In case your website has fallen a victim to the latest Penguin update, SEMRUSH can identify what problems are causing a negative reputation on your website and help resolve those issues. Keyword research has been made easy, a user can easily know how trendy a keyword is in a given period of time. Upon verifying a website link with SEMRUSH, someone can get the following information – which keywords are generating traffic for a backlink, the position of those keywords, volume and cost per click, how many results the search engines are generating etc. SEMRUSH costs from $149.
2. Ahrefs
To get rid of poor quality backlinks that’s affecting your website in Google’s search engine results, probably AHrefs is the tool you are looking for. To work on dofollow links, extensive research on keywords and trends are required and AHrefs could greatly help every SEO professional. However, to accessall features of the tool, you have to make a purchase. But a free account would get you a complete analysis of all the available backlinks and even anchor text analysis on the user’s own website. The pricing starts from $79 to $399; monthly.
3. Open Link Profiler
Despite being free, Open Link Profiler is one of the best online backlink checker tools. No download is required as this program works online. To get assessment on a specific link, just input the website address on the specific field and get all necessary details like the number of total backlinks, unique links, nofollow links etc. Also, analysis on anchor text, position in the industry, link context quality etc. all are available for free.
4. BuzzSumo
Free and Pro – two versions of BuzzSumo are available for a different range of users. Backlinks to a website and details on those links can be assessed by just typing in a website address on the free tool. From a complete list of results, users can filter out specific results based on language, top level domains (TLDs) etc.
5. BackLinkWatch
For a quick peek-in, BackLinkWatch is great backlink checking tool. However, this tool is more generic and useful for those who might not require precise information on backlinks and search engine results but still want to check the statistics. BackLinkWatch indeed provides a lot of detail on keywords, position of those keywords, current trend and details on TLDs etc. but not in a very accurate form. BackLinkWatch is free.
Conclusion
These five tools are specialized on different levels – for SEO professionals to amateur or hobbyist website owners. For the best results, we would suggest signing up for a paid service.
