The Ultimate In-Depth Website Backlink Checker

Links (hyperlinks) are a part of HTML code that lets web browser users pass to another page or website when you click on it. Links are found in HTML with <a> tag: <a href="/online-rank-checker.htm"> Rank Tracker</a>.

Backlinks are links on one website that, when clicked, take the user to another site. For example: this is a link, click here, https://www.webceo.com/online-rank-checker.htm. Backlinks can look like text as well as appear in the form of an image.

A text link has its anchor text which is used to create the clickable part of a backlink.

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors, especially with Google. The quantity, quality and relevance of backlinks for a web page are among the factors that search engines like Google evaluate in order to estimate how important the page is.

Take into account that not only is the number of backlinks important, but their quality is as well. You would prefer to gain 10 high-quality backlinks than 100 low-quality ones.

Dofollow and nofollow are link attributes. "Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don’t follow links on this page" or "Don’t follow this specific link."

The No-follow value instructs search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link’s target in the search engine’s index. So a search engine will not consider the link important. Nofollow links won’t drive much or any link juice to your website.

Dofollow links perform in a completely opposite manner: they grow your domain authority and serve as a positive ranking factor.

These attributes may be found on three levels of links:

• Link level is the most local, it tells the search engine not to count a single link on the page: <a href="https://www.site.com" rel="nofollow">link text</a>
• Page level means that this part of the code will tell a crawler/search engine not to follow links on the full page. You can exclude links from crawling with the meta tag:
• Site level involves robot.txt which indicates if crawlers or search engines can or cannot crawl parts of a website. A Nofollow instruction is specified by "Disallow" tag. The basic format looks like:
  User-agent: [user-agent name]
  Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]

There are two important backlink quality indicators which work together: relevancy + the authority of the donor website. You can evaluate relevancy just by analyzing the content of the donor website. As for the authority, you can evaluate it with Majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics. These two metrics are important as a pair, because obviously it makes no sense to gain 100 links with low Trust Flow, and only a few links from high authority donor websites won’t drive much traffic to your website.

Another important metric is high-quality in-depth content on a donor page. A high-quality backlink from a good website can be compared to a diamond, because it is really difficult to get. That’s why you should be ready to follow strict requirements. On the other hand, poor backlinks are quite easy to get. However they may hurt your website backlink profile.

With the WebCEO Backlink Checker tool (Backlink Profile) you can evaluate your and your competitor’s backlinks among other important metrics:

• link text (or anchor text) which appears on the donor website;
• target page is the page of your website where the referring page is linking to;
• donor website rating metrics: URL Trust Flow and URL Citation Flow (these are Majestic’s metrics);
• link status: see if the link is dofollow, nofollow or toxic;
• the number of the donor website’s external links shows the popularity of the donor page; however if the page has too many external links it may be considered spammy.

Backlinks can really hurt your website if they’re not relevant, low-quality and done incorrectly.

Backlinks are an important ranking factor, however things changed after the Google Penguin algorithm’s introduction. The number of backlinks may affect your website’s rankings, but their quality is much more important.

Now, when you gain a link, Google can evaluate it in three different ways:

• Consider it natural and let it help your website rank
• Ignore the link so it neither drives weight to your website nor hurts your website rank
• Penalize your website if Google believes you manipulated this link

That’s why you should regularly analyze your backlinks – to avoid a Google penalty from, for instance, a black hat SEO attack and to make sure your backlink profile is natural and healthy.

There are 2 major backlink data providers on the SEO market: Ahrefs and Majestic. Both providers have their proprietary databases and crawlers which crawl websites and collect data on their backlinks on a regular basis. Ahrefs does not offer the possibility to integrate their data into the other SEO platforms while Majestic does.

That's why the most popular SEO platforms, including WebCEO, are fed backlink data from Majestic.

The good news is that you'll get the Majestic backlink data with WebCEO for free. You can check your backlinks across different metrics: link text, target page, URL Citation Flow, URL Trust Flow and link status (dofollow, nofollow or toxic).

It depends on the type of campaign you’re running.

If you are working on your backlinks actively, doing off-page campaigns and soliciting backlinks, then you should check backlinks monthly (or sometimes more often).

If you want to do natural link earning, then you won’t need to do frequent backlink checks. So you can set scanning quarterly – that will be enough.

The best backlink checker has to provide you all must-have metrics. These are:

• link text (or anchor text) which appears on the linking website;
• target page = the page of your website where the referring page is linking to;
• website rating metrics which are proprietary for every data provider. Majestic shows you URL Trust Flow and URL Citation Flow;
• link status which shows whether the backlink is dofollow, nofollow or toxic.

Toxic links are links to your website from spam websites, link farms, virus and malware websites or networks created only for link building. This usually happens when someone wants to achieve a sudden rank boost and tries to buy links from shady people. This is a really harmful method that may end with a Google penalty.

When the WebCEO Backlink Checker finds toxic links on your website, you will see them in a list marked in red. Then you have two ways to act if a manual perusal shows them to be really toxic:

1. You can visit the donor websites and contact webmasters asking to remove the link. But you can’t be sure that the answer will come quickly; sometimes they won’t answer at all. You will never know if it was a negative SEO attack because the donor website owner won’t answer your e-mail. Of course you may try this method, but if you don’t receive an answer for a few weeks, the next method will be needed.
2. Use the Google Disavow Tool. This is the way to tell the search engine that you have nothing in common with those harmful websites.

You can choose to disavow links manually but it’s quite a long process. You’ll have to find all your unnatural (toxic) backlinks, organize them into one list and then log on to the Google Disavow Tool using your Google Search Console account, and then upload the file. Keep in mind that Google will have to evaluate your links and make sure you’re not disavowing the wrong links. All these actions take a lot of time, and in the automation era it seems to make no sense.

With WebCEO you can make it much easier. The WebCEO Backlink Checker tool puts all your backlinks in one list; links with green status are natural and links with red status are toxic or suspected toxic. You can also assign a ‘toxic’ tag to specific backlinks by hand (manually). You may check the charts and make sure everything is right. Then you may select those backlinks which are toxic and then go through the disavowing process.

So with the WebCEO Backlink Profile tool you will save a lot of time as you will not have to manually detect toxic links and prepare a .doc with the list of links. You will do this in a few clicks. The hardest thing is waiting for Google to process your request.

With WebCEO, you'll have access only to the safe link building techniques.
A Competitor Backlink Spy, a Content Submission tool, a Buzz Tracker and a DIY SEO checklist – all these tools will be a great help for you to build high quality backlinks. To keep your backlinks clean and non-toxic, the Backlink Profile and Partner Links Watch tools go a long way.