6 Best Free Online Backlink Checker Tools

Backlink is probably the most talked about word in the field of Search Engine Optimization. Quality and authority backlink is the success mantra for bloggers today.

Gone are the days when the sheer number of backlinks would propel your site to the top places in search engine results. A major change in search engine algorithms in 2015 saw more emphasis being put on quality over quantity. 2016 will be no different.

Free Online Backlink Checker

Today our focus is on some of the best online backlink checker tools. Most of the tools are completely free, however a few of these tools have a pro version with added features. I will be providing the details with the links to the tools wherever possible.

Backlinks checker: Why is it required?

These free tools will help you to find all the external links pointing to your website, thereby enabling you to sort out the good links from the bad ones. And then later on you can sanitize the low-quality links and make sure that Google’s Penguin algorithm does not kill your blog.

We all know that backlinks are dofollow and nofollow in nature and we generally focus our attention on creating dofollow links. Such links pass link juice and help in improving the domain authority and page authority of your blog. The back link checker tools can easily provide you with all the details on the type of links.

Moreover, these website link checker tools will also enable you to check your competitor’s backlinks which will give you an insight on how they are ranking for different keywords in your niche. So, you can analyze the competition and work your way to outrank them! Sounds good, right?

How to check backlinks to your blog with online backlink checker websites

1. OpenLinkProfiler

I love this tool for SEO analysis, to check backlinks to my blog as well as for competitor analysis. This link checking tool is absolutely free to use. You can find all the freshest links to you site as well as the historical ones.

This online tool segregates the number of nofollow vs dofollow links and gives you a result almost instantaneously in the form of a ‘Nofollow Links’ percentage metric. OpenLinkProfiler gives you a lot of metrics to play around. Few of them are the Link Influence Score , Link age, Link context etc. You can download the report in a.csv format as well.

Another good feature is the Link Disinfection that provides you with low quality, suspicious links to your website. You can check those backlinks and take necessary action to remove them to avoid Google penalty. This is the one of the best backlink checker free to use, without a doubt.

2. SEMRUSH

SEMRUSH is a complete tool that lets you perform an SEO audit of your blog. Keyword research, keyword ranking, checking competition and checking for backlinks, this tool does it all.

You can get the backlink report for any website with just a few clicks along with the anchor text information. A lot of useful metrics are provided like link distribution, TLD (Top Level Domain) distribution and authority etc. SEMRUSH updates its database daily and captures most of the recent backlinks as well.

A unique feature of SEMRUSH is the backlink comparison tool. This feature enables you to compare the backlinks of your own domain with other’s. You get a very detailed report as well. All in all, this is a pretty decent backlinks checker tool. You do have to pay for the pro version, however the free version should be good enough if you are not looking for any detailed information.

3. AHrefs

AHrefs, although a paid backlink checker online tool, can be used for free if you register for an account on its website. This tool is great for backlink analysis along with the anchor text info which comes in very handy if your blog has been hit by the Penguin update. You can easily make a note of the anchor text and take remedial action. The tool is very useful for competitor’s backlink analysis as well and it also shows you the number of social shares for your blog posts.

You will be delighted to see a detailed report in the form of a graph that depicts new backlinks vs old ones. It also shows the links that you have gained recently and the ones that you have lost. The dofollow and nofollow links are also shown precisely.

AHrefs updates the database every 15 minutes and is used by a lot of SEO professionals to check backlinks. Do give it a try.

4. Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is also a backlink checker tool mostly used by SEO and SEM professionals. They have a database of their own of the top million websites which they call as ‘Majestic Million’. They rank websites based on this data in the top millions along with a few other criteria.

Once you submit a query, you get the total number of backlinks along with referring domains and IPs. You can also see the time when your website was last crawled. The ‘Trust Flow’ and ‘Citation Flow’ are a couple of unique metrics used by Majestic that helps in determining the authority of a website.

The free service of Majestic SEO acts as a decent backlinks checker. You may upgrade to the pro versions for added benefits.

5. Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a widely used backlink checker tool used by SEO experts and website owners worldwide. It has a free as well as a paid version which you can choose based on your requirements. Since Google stopped updating Page Rank a few years back, the MOZ metrics have become phenomenal in judging a site’s authority. Open Site explorer provides you with the Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA) and the MOZ rank which have become very important metrics today.

This free online backlink finder tool is very good in comparing the backlinks between two domains. You can easily find out the backlinking strategy used by your competitor and can beat them in their own game!

Open Site Explorer is very accurate in the analysis and the results can be trusted, however, the low-quality links are difficult to filter. All in all this backlink checker tool is worth trying.

6. Backlink Watch

BacklinkWatch is possibly the easiest to use and a completely free online backlink checker tool. Backlink Watch uses AHrefs API, so the results can be counted on. You just need to enter the blog/website URL and you will get the results immediately. The only disavantage is that you cannot export the results to a .csv format and there are a lot of pop-up ads on the website. Other than that, this backlink finder works pretty well.

This was our roundup of few of the best and trusted online backlink checker tools which are used by bloggers and SEO professionals alike. Do let us know if you have something to add to this post in the comment section below.