To know which links lead to a promoted website and to analyze them regularly is one of the main tasks of an SEO specialist. However, for best results this will not be enough. It will be necessary to control not only “your own” link mass, but also to analyze the competitor’s links, since only in this case you can hope to bring the Internet resource to the top.
What can the analysis of backlinks show?
Studying backlinks helps to establish:
- Destination URL
- status and anchor of the incoming link;
- Shares on Google Plus and Facebook
- whether the page with a link in Google or Yandex is indexed;
- Ahrefs rating and authority of the MOZ domain;
- the number of backlinks and domains that link to the donor site;
- site rating according to Alexa Rank;
- the number of all backlinks from the donor page;
- Thematic domain citation index;
- Google PR domain and page.
Search and analysis of backlinks to your site
A study of the number and other characteristics of the backlinks of a web resource will show which of them fell out of the search engine indexation, were paid, but they were not placed or installed on spam sites, which do not work for another reason. The results you get by analyzing backlinks will help optimize and organize your backlink database. In addition, you can track the growth dynamics of the positions of the web resource.
Analysis of backlinks to other people's sites
It is always useful to study the links of competitors, especially those who are in high positions in the search results. The analysis will help build or adjust the tactics of promoting your own web resource. In addition, when a SEO specialist receives a list of link sources for successful competitors, he can use it to succeed.
How to check backlinks: ways (free)
The best in this category are the corresponding services of Google and Yandex.
You can start working with the first of them by first linking your web resource to it. To do this, go to Google Webmaster Tools and select "Links to your site" on the "Search Traffic" tab. In the window that opens, the results for your resource will appear. They may be a little inaccurate, because the data is not updated daily.
As for the free Yandex.Webmaster service, you can use it by going to the "Site Indexing" tab, in which you should select "Inbound Links". At the same time, you will also need to bind your resource, which is quite simple:
- need to have or already have a mailbox on Yandex;
- go to the webmaster.yandex.ru section (for example, through the search bar);
- add your site through the form;
- confirm the rights to this resource in a way convenient for you.
After that, the system will give out quite detailed information. To find out, click on the “Links” button located in the menu located on the left side of the page that opens and select “Inbox”.
You will get the opportunity to see those that are classified as deleted and current. If desired, it will be possible to sort them by TIC and date of creation.
Partially paid services
Service Linkpad.ru (formerly Solomono) is designed to study links related to the Russian segment of the Internet. Of its advantages, small analyzes can be noted. In addition, it has its own database of sites, its own server and is very easy to use. There are also disadvantages. In particular, backlinks can only be obtained for a domain, but not for a page. In addition, the server is partially free.
Getting a list of backlinks and finding out their number is easy. Just enter the domain name of the site in the search bar.
The best paid service
Among these options, Ahrefs (ahrefs.com) is the most convenient and effective. The cost of his services can be found in the "Rates" section. Ahrefs allows you to make a complete external SEO analysis of your resource, check backlinks to competitors' websites, view the entire list of pages from which they come and see anchors. Having become acquainted with all this information, an experienced specialist will be able to understand the strategy of promoting competitors. To get all this information, you need to purchase an account and enter the domain name of the site in the search bar. Then, on the “Backlinks” tab, you will see the whole list of pages that link to it, regardless of whether they are open or not.
Other paid services
One of Ahrefs rivals is the Magesticseo service, which is not much inferior to Ahrefs. To see the backlinks of a particular site, you need to enter its address in the search bar. Then on the summary tab, a lot of data will appear. Analysis of external links obtained in this way will be an effective help to SEO specialists.
To summarize: step by step instructions
If you are interested in how to check backlinks, do the following:
- Choose one of the tools described above, or, for example, the service mainspy.ru/analiz_ssylok_sajta, which works perfectly with all domains, including those that have names in Cyrillic (for example, with "***. Ru").
- Identify the page you want to check.
- Copy its URL.
- Paste this address into the link analyzer field (you need to put a check mark in the box in front of “Excluding closed” so that non-responsive backlinks do not appear).
- Click on the “Check” button.
- As a result of the service, you will receive a list of all internal and external links to this page or from it to other resources.
- The analysis is carried out taking into account their activity, accessibility to indexing on Google and Yandex, closed by nofollof or noindex tags, placements (for example, in program code comments, etc.).
How to use the results
If you decide to buy a backlink or trade, then the analysis of backlinks will help to immediately reveal any fraud attempts.
Now consider how to evaluate their mass.
Link donor sites are removed from many high or low authority resources through links. Denote the total set of backlinks as CitationFlow. Now we introduce the concept of TrustFlow for distance from reputable sources. In this case, the quality of the link profile of any of the sites is estimated by a simple CF / TF ratio. For “good” resources, the ratio of CitationFlow to TrustoFlow should be approximately equal to one. In order not to make calculations manually or with the help of a calculator, as well as to find out the values of CF and TF, you can use the site majestic.com. Thanks to him, checking backlinks will be faster and much more efficient.
Link rank
If you want to learn how to check backlinks (the methods provided by well-known search engines see above), then you can check the quality of the mass of backlinks through the free MEGAINDEX service. It evaluates the site profile through a fairly extensive set of parameters. This takes into account:
- total number of domain names;
- MegaIndex LR value;
- total number of anchors and backlinks;
- unique links and IP addresses from which links go;
- subdomains and subnets;
- calculate MegaIndex Link Rank by summing the same indicator of all donor web resources. To do this, use the following formula LinkRank = Log 5 (IP * 0.75 / HC + 1) / BC, where:
IP is the number of sites that link to a donor;
BC - the number of weklinks from the page;
HC - the level of nesting of the donor resource page (equal to 1 for the main one).
Another advantage of this service is that the list of donor resources and backlink data can be exported to a table (free of charge) and used for processing and calculating various indicators of website promotion performance.
SEO Spy Glass Professional
This multifunctional and convenient tool helps to check the links leading to the site. With its help, you can search for backlinks by various sources. In order to use this service, you need to enter links manually or import their list in CSV format. You can then check each backlink for 45 factors.
Although Yandex announced in 2014 that it did not take into account links when ranking commercial requests, they still play a significant role in website promotion. However, backlinks have a different effect on the position of a resource in search results.
The SEO Spy Glass Enterprise program is intended for their analysis and revealing of poor-quality links. With its help, a SEO specialist will be able to reduce the likelihood of a site getting hit by filters from search engines such as Google Pengui and Yandex’s AGS.
Among other things, the program can give recommendations, indicating the percentage of danger “penalty”.
Now you know how to implement effective backlink analysis. For what you need it, you also know, and you can use the information received to effectively promote your resource.