Backlink Monitoring: 5 Best Practices (+3 Tools)

In the fast-evolving world of SEO, staying on top of your link building strategy is crucial for building and maintaining a strong online presence. This is why it has become highly important to monitor backlinks, as it allows you to assess the quality, relevance, and impact of your backlink profile, detect potential issues, and take all the necessary steps to improve your link-building strategy.

Before jumping into the main tips for effective backlink monitoring, it is essential to learn what backlinks are.

So, let’s start!

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to your site. If someone links to your site, then you gain a backlink from them. 

There are multiple ways to get backlinks. You can try guest posting, broken link building, building relationships with other link-building specialists, and so on. Additionally, you can do competitor backlinks analysis to examine your competitors’ backlink profiles and later use this information to reach out to these reliable sources and collaborate with them.

Don’t forget about visual content marketing. In fact, 53% of markets leverage the power of infographics to earn more backlinks. 

All these strategies can help you build quality links. The more quality backlinks you earn from authority websites, the more your website visibility increases in search engines. However, you have to keep the tracking backlinks process in mind.

Some people think that the more backlinks you build, the better. However, it is a common misconception that can hinder businesses from building the right SEO strategy.

In fact, it is important to get quality backlinks. However, building backlinks is not enough to run a successful SEO campaign. You should also regularly track backlinks to make sure there are no toxic or irrelevant links pointing to your website.

In today’s article, we will share five helpful tips to help you better understand how to monitor backlinks more effectively in 2024. Whether you’re a website owner, an SEO professional, or a digital marketer, these tips will equip you with all the necessary knowledge and tools to stay ahead in the game.

So, keep reading!

What is backlink monitoring?

Before we jump into how to monitor backlinks, it is important to understand what monitoring backlinks is.

Backlink monitoring is the process of keeping track of all existing backlinks and assessing their quality. If there are any poor-quality links, you can easily identify and either fix or remove them, as keeping them can only hurt your SEO efforts. 

It is an important part of SEO specialists’ jobs. However, backlink monitoring is not a one-time task to complete but an ongoing process if you want long-term success. Instead, you have to continuously learn how to manage your backlinks, resolve issues related to them, and build better ones over time. Before going on with this guide, consider checking out our SEO glossary to learn the basic terms.

Why should you monitor backlinks?

The importance of backlinks in SEO is still significant and remains a crucial factor in determining the authority and credibility of a website. Knowing what backlinks are without the understanding of how to analyze them is useless.  Hence, backlink monitoring is crucial. In the world of SEO, search engines consider backlinks votes of confidence. When you get a link from quality websites, search engines understand that you are an authority that provides users with a relevant and trustworthy source of information.

If you monitor backlinks regularly, you will gain valuable insights into the health and quality of your backlink profile. You will be able to easily assess the credibility and relevance of the websites linking to you. Luckily, backlink tracking software allows you to do that exactly.

Besides, once you establish consistency in monitoring backlinks, you can identify and address potential issues that may arise over time. For instance, you can identify any broken or lost links, toxic or spammy backlinks, or negative SEO attacks on time and not let them harm your website’s reputation and rankings. 

Last but not least, backlinks are one of the most significant ranking factors for search engines. When you monitor backlinks, you can evaluate your link-building efforts and make informed decisions about what strategies to implement in the future. 

In other words, you can find more actionable link-building tactics, including SaaS link-building strategies, figure out what content attracts quality backlinks, and unlock opportunities for further improvement.

How to monitor backlinks more efficiently: 5 simple tips

Now that you know what backlinks are and why it is essential to monitor backlinks, it is time to learn some tips for more effective backlink monitoring.

Find and get rid of spammy backlinks

Maintaining a healthy backlink profile can be challenging sometimes, especially when you have to deal with spammy or toxic backlinks. Such backlinks negatively impact your website’s credibility, authority, and search engine rankings. This is why it is highly recommended to frequently track backlinks and conduct backlink monitoring to detect and remove any spammy backlinks.

The first step in identifying spammy backlinks is to regularly monitor your backlink profile and check the spam score using relevant backlinks monitoring tool and software’s like Spam Score Checker, Moz, and Website SEO Checker. With these tools, you can find all the suspicious or irrelevant websites linking to your site and assess their quality as well as relevance.

Pay attention to their domain rating and content. If both aspects are not good, you should definitely take action to deal with these websites.

After finding all spammy backlinks, you should remove them. To do so, make sure to reach out to the webmasters of the linking websites and politely request the removal of the backlinks. Provide them with specific details about the links and explain why they are harmful to your website’s reputation. While this process can take a lot of time, it is crucial for maintaining a clean and trustworthy backlink profile and is a part of learning how to manage your backlinks properly.

If you are unable to contact the webmasters or don’t get a response for a long time, disavowing the spammy backlinks can come in handy. Disavowing involves informing search engines, such as Google, that you want to get rid of specific backlinks pointing to your site. 

Once you make monitoring backlinks and disavowing spammy ones a habit, search engines will be signaled that you no longer want these backlinks to affect your website’s ranking. Once you do this, Google or other search engines won’t consider those links when evaluating your website’s authority and rankings.

To disavow spammy backlinks, create a disavow file that includes the URLs of the backlinks you want to disassociate from your site. Next, submit the disavow file through Google Search Console or the respective tools provided by other search engines.

Make sure your backlinks are live

It is important to learn how to view backlinks to make sure your links are live and contribute to your website’s visibility and authority. Use reliable backlink tracking software to identify any broken or lost links. Contact webmasters and request updates or seek alternative link exchange opportunities. This way, you can maintain a strong backlink profile and maximize the impact of your SEO efforts.

Check that all your good links are do follow

When monitoring backlinks, it’s also important to ensure that all your good links are do-follow. Do-follow links are links that allow search engines like Google to point back to your website. In contrast, no-follow links are links with a rel=“nofollow” tag. So, while you’re learning how to check backlinks, you should keep this in mind.

If you want to understand whether your links are do-follow, check the HTML attributes of each link. Typically, hyperlinks are do-follow by default. However, it’s worth verifying the attributes in certain cases, such as when you receive guest posts. 

According to an Ahrefs’ study, 10.6% of all backlinks to the top 110,000 websites are no-follow. They don’t contribute to your website rankings in search engines. So, pay attention to the nature of your links to maximize your SEO efforts.

While no-follow links can still drive some traffic, they have little or almost no positive influence in terms of SEO value.

However, having do-follow links is not enough to improve your rankings. It is important to understand how to track backlinks so that you can ensure your do-follow links are of good quality. Getting do-follow links from spammy or irrelevant websites can only harm your SEO efforts.

However, having do-follow links is not enough to improve your rankings. You should ensure that your do-follow links are of good quality. Getting do-follow links from spammy or irrelevant websites can only harm your SEO efforts.

If you monitor backlinks and detect poor-quality do-follow links, you can do the following.

• Contact the webmaster and ask to remove all your toxic do-follow backlinks.
• Create a ‘disavow’ file and submit it to Google to ignore those links.

By thoroughly examining the nature of your links and making sure they are do-follow, you can enhance the impact of your SEO efforts and improve your website’s visibility in search engine rankings.

Align the anchor text with backlinks

When it comes to building backlinks, the anchor text is a crucial element that hugely affects the link’s relevance and impact. Today, it is more than important to make sure anchor text aligns with the context of the linking page and the destination page to maximize your SEO efforts.

The anchor text should precisely describe the content of the destination page and provide clear context to both your readers and search engines. It should be concise, clear, and reflective of the linked keywords or topic. This significantly improves the user experience and helps search engines better understand the relationship between the linked pages.

To ensure your anchor text aligns with the context, carefully examine both the linking and destination pages. Analyze the keywords, topic, and overall context to identify suitable anchor text that accurately represents the content being linked. It is advised not to use generic or vague anchor text that provides little information to users and search engines.

By optimizing your anchor text and ensuring it matches the context, you can highly enhance user experience and your website’s overall relevance and visibility in search engine rankings. Note that it is especially easy to have your target anchor text when you’re doing guest posting simply because you can write and tweak the content as you wish.

Find and fix broken links

Tracking backlinks also assumes identifying and fixing broken links. Those are web pages that can’t be found or accessed by users for different reasons. They can negatively impact your SEO efforts. Therefore, it is essential to take the time to find and fix broken links to ensure a smooth browsing experience and maintain a strong online presence. But how to manage your backlinks when it comes to the broken ones?

For monitoring backlinks, use presently available tools and software that can crawl your site and detect any URLs that return error codes like 404 (Page Not Found). By implementing regular backlink audits, you can find broken links and take appropriate action.

Fixing broken links should be done properly. In case of broken internal links, update the URL or set up redirects to relevant pages. As for the external broken links, contact the website owner, let them know about the issue, and ask them to fix it.

Fixing broken links comes with many advantages. It improves navigation which allows people to easily explore your site without facing any dead pages. Besides, search engines, such as Google, pay attention to whether your site has healthy link structures.

So, fixing broken links is not only a necessity but a must if you want to stay ahead of the competition and make sure your SEO efforts don’t go in vain.

Why Use a Backlink Monitor Tool

We just went over all the important points and elements when it comes to tracking backlinks and leveraging them better.

But how to check backlinks more professionally? Is it about sitting in front of your screen the whole time and monitoring backlinks?

Luckily, we have access to many backlink monitoring tools which allow us to complete this task on a better level.

The answer to “why use a backlink monitor tool?” lies in how they work. Backlink monitoring tools have advanced web crawlers which allows them to consistently scan for links pointing to your website.

Simply put, in case there’s a new backlink, these tools will catch it and show in the future reports.

Is that all?

There are a bunch of reason for why use a backlink monitor tool, so let’s go over the main points.

• Advanced web crawlers

As mentioned above, backlink monitoring tools have professional web crawlers, much like the Google Spiders, which go all over the web and “find” all your backlinks. They make sure to update the database from time to time to ensure you always get fresh info. Let’s admit it: you can’t sit around all day and find all the billions of backlinks manually.

• Reporting

As much as you’d like, it’s really hard to complete this task manually as well. Even if you’re using an SEO tool, the reporting part can be quite sketchy. Based on the database backlink monitoring tools have, they can help identify any issues, toxic backlinks, lost backlinks, etc. In addition, these reports can help you quickly track performance and make future decisions.

• Metrics

Last but not list, a major reason for why use a backlink monitor tool is about metrics. Remember all the backlink information the tools stored in their database? Now, it’s time to have the right metrics to analyze this data. These key link building metrics will help you understand the quality, relevance, and more about your backlinks, and again, help you make data-based decisions.

With this information in mind, you may wonder what are some good backlink tracking software you can use for tracking backlinks more professionally.

3 powerful tools for backlink monitoring

If you are planning to monitor backlinks, we highly recommend making use of backlink tracking software. Some of them might be familiar to you. So, you can get started with one of them and see whether they meet your needs.

In today’s article, we have put together three famous SEO tools that will help you easily monitor backlinks.

Google Search Console

If you are a newbie in the world of SEO, it is always good to get started with the basics. And Google Search Console is one of the best tools you can use for monitoring backlinks.

With this tool, you can access reports where you can check domains linking to your site and assess their quality. You can see the list of top linking sites and keywords. Moreover, you can view URLs that were backlinks the most (both internal and external).

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Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t provide you with an in-depth analysis of your backlink profile. But you can easily install it and use it for free.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is yet another powerful SEO tool that allows users to monitor backlinks as well as use it for keyword research and analytics.

But how to check backlinks with Ahrefs?

With Ahrefs, you can check the page authority, get rid of poor-quality links, and see how much referral traffic you get. By using Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker, you can follow keywords that are of high importance as well as check their backlink profile. Besides, you can assess the link status and understand whether there are any new or lost links.

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Unfortunately, Ahrefs is not a free tool. But the good news is that it has several pricing options, and you can choose the one that best fits your budget.

SEMrush

SEMrush is another reliable SEO tool that can be helpful if you decide to learn how to track backlinks. Again, it is not a free tool but affordable enough for your SEO campaigns. 

With this tool, you can easily track your backlink status as well as conduct a backlink audit to detect spammy links that can damage your website’s SEO.

Conclusion

We hope that our article gave you a clear understanding of why it is important to regularly monitor backlinks. By following the above-mentioned tips and a backlinks monitoring tool, you will be able to perform backlink monitoring with ease.

All you have to do is carefully assess the quality of each backlink and identify any links that could harm your SEO efforts. By doing so, you will be able to improve your website’s visibility and authority.

FAQ about monitoring backlinks