Link building is a serious issue and it is recommended that it be conducted with analytical tools to get the most out of it. There are tons of good tools you can lay your hands on, each of them having their good side and can contribution to your marketing and link building campaign.
Here, we provide 10 tools you will find really useful and these tools should suffice for every link building campaign.
Let’s get started.
1. Google Search Console (GSC)
Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is one of the most excellent tools used by digital marketers to manage their website’s presence on Google. With GSC, you can get some basic overview of your website link popularity. One good thing about GSC is that despite its enormous uses and potentials, it is free.
2. Ahrefs Free Broken Link Checker
Ahrefs Free Broken Link Checker helps you clean up your link profile by detecting all broken links associated with your site. Like many bad link checkers, the Ahrefs tool detects broken links on your website and those that can be found on other websites. It is indeed a great tool for managing and keeping your link profile clean.
5. OpenLinkProfiler
OpenLinkProfiler will pull in-depth information about the links pointing to your website. The information it provides will include internal and external links, Google’s indexing status, social media shares, and much more. It also tells you the websites that have links to your site. The link profile and details it provides can help you assess if you have spammy links, if you have your website links on competitors’ websites and all that.
4. Seobility
Seobility is an excellent link checker. It analyses all of your SEO, your metadata, page quality, link quality and can give you results for every page.
This backlink checker will generate a report that shows how many existing quality backlinks each website has (in its own ranking) as well as how many new, high-quality links should be built to improve performance.
5. Majestic
Majestic is one of our favourites at Todhost. It offers a range of backlink analysis tools to help you analyze your website health in terms of Domain, Trust Flow and Citation Flow.
6. Semrush
Semrush is another great analytical tool providing much detailed analysis and useful action that should follow for free. If you are not using this tool, then you should sign up and explore its power today.
7. Moz
The Moz Link Explorer when used displays your domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA). As mentioned earlier in this post, both metrics are not used by Google in ranking websites. However, we have found a correlation between domain authority, page authority and the potential of web pages to rank in Google and other search engines. This suggests that both the Google algorithm and the Moz tool could be using similar parameters in website assessment.
8. Monitor Backlinks Checker
Monitor Backlinks is a free backlink checker that can be used easily to analyze both your backlinks as well as those of competitors
9. Neil Patel Backlink Checker
Neil Patel’s free backlink checker can help you uncover valuable insights into who links to you website or your competitors. This information can help you understand link opportunities amongst other insights.
10. WooRank Free Backlink Checker
Woorank is great backlink analysis tool as well as a complete SEO analysis tool. Its output can be pretty helpful for you to address most of the common issues associated with both on-page and off-page SEO.
The Value of Links
It is important to note that not all links carry the same value and same impact on your website performance. Different attributes are attached to links. Some are “dofollow” or “follow” links, others are “nofollow” and some are “sponsored” links. Each attribute tells Google how to handle the link.
The difference between a Dofollow and a Nofollow link is that a Dofollow link passes PageRank signals (in SEO, this is referred to as link juice), and a Nofollow link doesn’t pass any link juice or page rank,”. It is the attribute a link carries, whether it be a nofollow or dofollow attribute that determines how Google treats the link.
On the other hand, the “sponsored” attribute is recommended for ads. When you post an advert on a website, it is recommended that you tell Google that it is a sponsored link so that Google does not treat it as a dofollow link. If you do not tell Google how it should treat the link, Google could see several ad links on your page as spammy and that can cause a penalty for the promoted page and for your website where you failed to specify the right link attribute.
So, dofollow links have SEO value while nofollow or sponsored links do not have SEO value.
Some websites will generally mark links in their forums, comment boxes and all such easy to acquire links as “nofollow”. That can save them from being seen as encouraging spammy links on their website which is something Google frowns at.
Does it mean that “nofollow” links are useless? No. For your link structure and profile to be seen as natural, it should contain “nofollow” attributes as well. You cannot have all “dofollow” or “follow” links as that will not look natural.
Page Relatedness
Another key consideration you should take seriously in link building is how related is the link to the topic being discussed and the industry of the websites. Generally, links that are considered to be quality links are expected to appear naturally in the page content. You cannot take a link to an SEO website appearing in a post on a football game and use an anchor text bearing the name of a footballer to be a good quality link.
Getting links from .edu, and .gov domains are great for SEO but again, they have to be natural. Google dislikes links gotten from .edu and .gov domains with a reward such as a patronage or a banner placement for those sites. Your links must have value which must be seen in the user benefits and value offered by its content and relatedness to the subject of discussion on the website where it is found.
Final Words
There is no doubt that links will continue to play a major role in how websites are ranked. That is unlikely to change in the near future, While changes to the Google algorithm is expected to improve Google’s understanding and tracking what it considers to be quality links, we suggest that every link building strategy must adhere to the fundamental requirement to make sure links are natural and worthy to be earned and not just acquired via some unacceptable and unethical means.
Of all the recommended link building strategies we have listed in the black hat methods, it should be emphasized that building links from a sound and strong content marketing strategy will remain the most rewarding. Links to your website that show a correlation between the subject matter and are incorporated because of the value it adds to the content and user benefits will remain far more beneficial, more likely to build referral traffic and support your ranking goals.
