Free Backlink Checker Tools To Check Competitors Backlinks:

The mantra for a successful endeavor  is, we always go forward keeping an eye on our competitors.
More is at stake when we are a blogger or an online enterprise. It becomes essential to outdo your competitor in order to obtain the ranking that the former does.
For this, we spy on our competitor’s traffic sources, the keywords he ranks for and the backlinks that point to the competitor’s domain.

This is a complete tutorial on how to check your competitor’s backlinks. Spying on your competitors’ backlinks can give you an idea on what domains are linking to their posts and thus you can target those sources too.
Read: 19+1 Ways To Cleverly Get Natural Backlinks To Your Blog

Why do a Backlink Analysis?

1. To know which sites are linking to your site or your competitor site.
2. In order to capture the friend domains of your competitor into your friend zone.
3. To compare your backlink profile with a strong competitor so that you can go stronger than them (this is helpful to tell Google that you are a competitor of an already established site).
4. To check your friends by seeing who is linking to you so that you can return them the favor.

List of Free Backlink Checker Tools

1. SEMRUSH:

SEMRush is one of the most popular SEO tools out there and now it has added backlink analysis feature to its arsenal. Previously it was very good for analyzing keywords both organic and ad keywords. The data can be got in a graphical format. Now that it has added a backlink checker feature all you have to do is:

• Go to the SEMRush homepage.
• Type the domain name (in my case I typed quicksprout.com), you want to analyze and hit enter.
• If you want to compare the domain names, there is a tab for that on the left corner and you can get a detailed list of referring domains, referring IPs, links from .gov and .edu sites as well as other TLDs.
• You can export it as PDF by clicking on the PDF button on the right top side.
  

In my opinion, the free version works pretty well unless you are one of those SEO analyst trying to lock horns with your competitor. In case, you are one there is a paid version for $69.95/mo which will give more in-depth analysis. Read my SEMrush review where I have provided special promo code to get SEMrush PRO account free for 2 weeks. Or to grab that offer, you can simply click this link.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is the best tool in getting a backlink analysis of a competitor site or any site. It has been the winner of the test conducted by Matthew on one million domains for backlinks.
Aherf is recognized by its up to satisfaction consumer support and detailed analysis. Its free version works for only three analysis while a fees of $79/mo is charged to use the backlink checker tool in its full glory.
For a free analysis just go to the home page and type the URL of the website whose total backlink analysis you wish to do. Other prices and packages are as shown here.
Then you get the complete analysis of the backlink profile of the site tested as shown in the image below. They provide a full analysis on number of dofollow backlinks, nofollow backlinks, links as text and image backlinks apart from the basic .edu and TLD based searches.

It gives a clear diagrammatical representation of the number of social shares the domain has got and includes Google +1, tweets and Facebook likes and shares.
The free account shows you the top ten results based on each search while the paid version has unlimited results.
You can export the searched result of backlinks thus generated into a .csv file in the paid version.
To export the report on the free version, follow this path.
Backlinks → external → backlinks → new/lost → export.

3. Majestic SEO

As the name suggests it is majestic and one of the most used SEO tools by professionals. It is the strongest competitor of ahref and is good at some places. They have their own curated list of majestic million where they rank sites on top million based on their rankings on links and other criteria. They have the largest database of links and also evaluate types based on quality of links coming from various sources.
The basic advantage of MajesticSEO is that you are free to download the link profile of your competitor and can twist them as you go so that you can have the clear view of the strategies of how the website has gained their backlinks.
They have various plans like the free plan. Their Silver plan, Gold plan and platinum plan are priced at £29.99, £ 99/mo, £250/mo respectively. For a basic search the free version is good to go with but it is advisable to better check the pricing page so that you get a better idea of which plan works well with your business.
On the summary tab, you get a full list of links referring to a domain or URL and it also gives us a detail about how many backlinks were indexed from how many domains and also gives you the latest crawl timing.

In the backlink tab, you get a complete list of backlinks that is available to a site. Here is a list of all filters I use in order to get a noise less URL report.

1. Filter out reports from more than five links from a single domain
2. I also filter the report to hide results from sites like .nz, .cnetc. that usually tend to be spam
3. Filter out link errors like 404 errors, 300 errors and duplicates in URL
4. Lastly I filter the results from URLs having “replytocom” and “comments” as these are nofollow links from WordPress comment sections that are useless in n meaningful analysis.

4. Open Site explorer

Open Site Explorer is a great tool from moz.com and when a product is from Moz it has to be good. They help you to see who is linking to your competitor site filtering the report through domain authority, and anchor text used.

Comparing amongst a bunch of other sites is also possible and this helps in understanding the key strategies of your competitor to build high quality backlinks.
Read: How To Build High Quality Natural Backlinks?
Open site explorer is still not very capable of filtering results from spammy links (there may be many some with high page authority too) and thus you have to very vigilant in rejecting a backlink from the OSE result that can lead to harm your own SEO.
I recommend this article from the Moz blog by Tom Anthony. It shows you a Google spreadsheet that grabs the top SERP results automatically, in addition to the metrics given by you. Read the tutorial to learn how to configure it.

5. SEO spyglass

SEO spyglass is a new tool that is completely evaluating itself in order to provide great results. In a recent update it has increased its database of indexed links to 15,000,000,000,000. This is pretty more than ahrefs and majestic SEO.
On the contrary it is not a web based client but is desktop software that runs from your PC and checks for all the live links at that point of time.
You get the fresh links and no error of dead links or links not updated (as in case of ahrefs and majestic seo). The number of backlinks for a single URL is 1100 but can’t export it whereas the paid version (a onetime fee) gives you the right to use any number of backlink analysis as well as exporting facility.

6. Backlink Watch

Backlink watch is the easiest tool out there to analyze the backlink portfolio of any website including yours. The good news is that it uses ahrefs’ API so you get pretty trustable results.

There is no option to export your results but there is a workaround to harness this free tool. Just copy all the reports from the site → open spreadsheet → right click → paste special → text → done (ok). Amazing, huh?

7. Google Alerts

Google alerts is the first thing that comes to mind when we think about monitoring a mention online. This easy to use tool can be used to get free alerts when your selected word/words are mentioned on the web. It can be your brand name, a product or your competitors’ name.

You can use it to monitor when your competitor is mentioned as a link on the web. The benefit is that the delivery is real time and thus could be helpful.
Though it is useful for getting basic information on a linking activity, the main drawbacks are that you do not get any notifications of the links that are already used (before you set your alert). It tells nothing about the quality of the linking site too.

8. Link diagnosis

Link diagnosis is a great tool that not only helps you get a wide variety of results like link type (nofollow, dofollow, missing, good etc.) , page internal + external links and also a brief about page rank distribution (now obsolete as Google officially announced its death).

9. Openlinkprofiler

Open link Profiler has been a favorite SEO tool for many. Open link profiler has the large database of freshest backlinks to a site which counts to the magical number of 2,00,000 backlinks to a domain.

They display links that are active in the last 90 days only so that you don’t have to deal with outdated stuff.
Their free version helps you download upto 100 links in csv format. This feature is not provided by any major SEO tools like majestic SEO, Ahrefs or open site explorer. They have a link influence score for all sites so that you get an idea of the best based pages on the basis of backlinks to it.

Working the backlinks inside out

1. Now that you have got the backlinks using any of the given tools out there, just copy the backlinks to a notepad and save it as a text file (remember we are not using MS word because it adds unnecessary coding to the text in it). Now save it.
2. Use a duplicate remover tool like duperemovetool to filter out further duplicate URLs that might be of no work.
3. For analyzing the backlinks I said to check if a backlink is live or not. Use this tutorial. It also checks if a link is penalized.
4. Use your experience and guts to cut out links that appear spammy even if any tool doesn’t consider a spam.
5. To use excel as a free alternative to analyze links you can use SEO tools for spreadsheets.
6. Now that you have got your best list of backlinks, save them to use for your SEO purposes.

BEWARE OF ANALYSIS PARALYSIS

Analysis paralysis is a term coined to refer to the process of wasting too much time in analyzing that hardly any time is left for doing the backlink building.
It means you waste so much time and resources in finding the backlink profile of your competitor that at the end you find out you have no time to build any meaningful backlinks and your competitors have moved pretty ahead. Beware of it.

Over to you

Being an SEO makes you different from a guy doing the same stuff. There are millions of ways optimizing your site for search engines and each SEO analyst has his own set of methods.
I would also suggest you to test SEMrush PRO account totally free by clicking this special promo link. Along with backlinks analysis, you can do a complete competition analysis including backlinks, keywords, keywords position, site audit etc.

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Free Google Keyword Rank Checker Tools:

Keyword in SEO means is a search term that is relevant to a website’s product or services it offers.
For example “dietician” for a website whose owner is involved in giving tips on weight loss. And Keyword ranking in that sense is number and position the website of the owner appears at the Google search results for that word.
Keyword rank checking is the most common practice done by SEO personnel and bloggers in order to check if they are appearing on the Google search results for the query they want to appear for.
If they are ranking then at which number is it? Rank checking also helps in knowing who your competitor is on the SERPs (Search engine Ranking Pages). And it is then that you can plan to outdo him.
There are a number of tools to check Google keyword rankings. In this post we will concentrate on how to easily and quickly check your rankings.
Back in 2007, Google’s VP of engineering, UdiMaber, called for a stir in the SEO industry, when he said that there were about 20-25% of the search queries that they had never seen before that day.
This was perhaps due to the fact that queries are naturally getting longer, with over half of search queries in 2010, being longer than 4 words.
However in real practice, unlike backlink analysis, it is practically impossible to tell about all the keywords your site ranks for. Google has a complicated and sophisticated analytics and the amount of data it handles everyday leaves no room for the speculations on the topic “for what all keywords is my site ranking”.

We will today discuss about Google keywords ranking checker tools. The below mentioned tools provide you with information on your rankings in the SERPs based on your keywords used. Here are some free (as well as paid) and quick tools to check your rankings.

Google Keyword Position Checker Tools

1) SEO SERP Workbench:

SEO serp workbench is a chrome extension so you don’t have to worry about offline software that might face no updates. SSW is used by bloggers and professionals alike to know their search engine rankings of the keywords. It is downloaded over 79K times which shows how useful people find it.

It supports many countries like US, UK and others and you can select a keyword and find the rankings of your site as well as your competitor’s site through the extension.
You can download and use it for instant comparisons and rank analysis and did I mention is it free?

2) SEO scores Android app:

This one android app makes the desktop users jealous for sure. It is a complete SEO toolkit with nearly 32 SEO tools packed into one. It gives you a score on your ranking, alerts you on blog mentions, gives backlink analysis and helps in backlink comparison and a lot more.
If you have an android set you won’t need tools ever, just install this app and you are set to go.
Here is the process of getting started:
Download the app from the app store > install > restart > add keywords and check rankings: it is as simple as that.

You don’t need to enter the URL again and again which is a time saver as we are using a mobile device. The report is mailed to your email id which is another goodie as you don’t have to export the data manually. This “export” feature is something so useful because most desktop clients don’tprovide.

3) Small SEO tools:

Small SEO tools have a big name when it comes to doing SEO sleekly and without much hassle. Mainly it is used for various other purposes like the backlink checker tool.

Its function as a keyword rank tracing tool is very fast and allows upto 20 keyword tracing per request. It supports three search engine visually Google, Bing and Yahoo.

4) Moonsy’s Google Position checker:

Moonsy has a very sleek feature. Although free it is a powerful tool that lets you check your ranks as well as a competitor rank analysis itself. What else could you ask for a rank checker tool?
Why Moonsy is something most bloggers go for is its clean search page with the coveted functionality to add more than one domains for testing the same ranks of the same keyword.

Using this you can also add your competitor’s site to compare how rankings have been working for you both.

5) Rank Checker

Rank Checker is a Firefox extension by SEObook, which is claimed to be open source and secure. By secure I here mean that your data is not exported to any SEO company which can manipulate it to their profit. The extension is completely hosted on your PC and tracks keyword rankings easily.

If you have Google account logged in, you can get personalized report on rankings but there is also an option to turn it off in order to see how you rank for keywords in the search engines in general.
If you want to validate your ranking shown, you can scroll over the number, press CTRL and clicking the mouse simultaneously. They also have “export as .csv” feature in the extension.

6) Keyword Rank checker by SERPS.com:

Serps.com is another free tool that is the best when you are doing searches that are based on countries. It has a locality based rank tracker and has upto 100 country supports.

7) SEO Centro:

SEO centro is a SEO based web portal like the small seo tools and Moonsy. It provides a detailed analysis of your keyword ranking based on three search engines viz., Google, Bing and Yahoo. It supports tracking competitor websites simultaneously too.

Here comes the King:

8) SEMRush

SEMrush is a great SEO tool and can be used for a variety of purposes. I recommend SEMrush to be there at every blogger’s tool list because it helps a lot in the SEO analysis. Apart from backlink analysis, keyword research and others, we can also do competitor analysis. Read this SEMrush review for detailed guide.

On SEMrush you enter the URL of the competitor and you get a bunch of information about the site. In the context of the post, we will concentrate on the keyword page. It gives the top hundred keywords the site is ranking for along with the keyword ranking, CPC and others like traffic percentage.
This will help you in knowing how your competitor is ranked and what about the chances of your ranking. Suppose it does not have optimized content or a low domain authority blog is ranking for something, you can cruelly snatch that ranking for you with little effort.

How to crush your competition [the samurai style!]?

1. Like the previous step go to the main search box but this time insert your blog URL.
2. You can now check your top five keywords that drive you the most organic traffic.
3. Now check your top five competitors and you can now do the same and clicking on your competitor’s name to gain their top five competitors. This way you get a detailed view of the keywords that rank in the network of you 25 competitors.
   

Try the Premium Version of SEMrush for 7 Days here
NB: This offer is only valid till Jan 17, 2015

Conclusion:

Overall there are tons of tools to check your website and keyword ranking easily and quickly. You can find competition and see what position your keywords have in the search results. By knowing your rankings you can do the following:

1. Know how your efforts are showing off and if they are not ranking you know what to do to get them on top.
2. If your keywords are ranking, you can monetize the pages that have high organic traffic.
3. Most companies don’t rank for keywords and instead pay for Adwords to show their pages in the search results. You can contact them and ask for a deal they can’t ignore as they have been already paying high for Adwords they most probably can’t ignore your deal.

Over to you

Now that we are having a clear idea on working tools we should better get to work because the faster we work the faster we get the results.
I would suggest trying out SEMrush which is a great tool with no potential competitor. The good thing is that it is free for 14 days that allows you to use the premium version without any cost.

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