When we think of SEO, the first word that comes to our mind is “backlinks”. But you need to be checking backlinks to prevent effects from negative SEO.
The rule is simple: the more relevant and quality backlinks you have, the higher your business is ranked in Google.
Backlinks are still the most important ranking factor for search engines, no matter what some say.
Why you should monitor incoming links
If you are serious about SEO and you want more organic traffic, you have to monitor all your backlinks to all the pages of your website.
These are several reasons why you should do so:
- You know when you receive a backlink from a website with high authority.
- Discover which are the most linked pages of your website. Write similar posts and you will get more links.
- Check if somebody is building bad backlinks to your website. Manage and protect your reputation.
- Find the most important backlinks to your site and try to get similar links.
- Look for the bad backlinks that can hurt your rankings and try to remove them.
In this article, I will show you what tools you can use to track your links so you can determine which ones are the most valuable for you.
SEO Tools to Check Backlinks
The first tool you can use is Monitor Backlinks.com.
Benefits
- Sends email alerts when you receive new backlinks.
- Checks for links to your homepage and all the other pages of your website.
- Everything is 100% automated so it saves you a lot of time.
- Easily keep track of all your backlinks.
How to use Monitor Backlinks
Create an account and add your domain by connecting it with Google Analytics.
You can add two competitors for which Monitor Backlinks will look for new links.
Add your main keywords that you want to rank for in Google.
You will be redirected to the panel where you can check all your backlinks, listed by different filters and metrics.
Monitor Backlinks will send you email alerts when a website links to your homepage or any other subpages.
You will get the same email alerts when your competitors are gaining new backlinks.
If you are interested in checking for links to your homepage or other pages from your website, you can use the top filters.
Click on “Filters” to choose the link to location for that backlink.
You can either choose your homepage, or a subpage. For example, if you are looking to check for the backlinks for yourwebsite.com/SEO-tutorial , type “SEO-tutorial”.
A list with all the backlinks that point to your particular page will be displayed. 
Open Site Explorer
Another great tool to help you check for backlinks is Open Site Explorer.org.
Benefits:
- DA (Domain Authority ) and PA (Page Authority) metrics provided by Moz
- Just discovered links feature. It shows the latest backlinks indexed by Google.
- Compare link metrics between your website and competitors
How to use Open Site Explorer
Add your domain and click “search”. The tool will show you a list with all your backlinks sorted by their value (Domain Authority).
If you want to check the latest backlinks to your website, click on “Just Discovered” .
On this page, you can see all the latest links to your website.
If you want to check for backlinks on your internal pages, simply replace your homepage URL with the one of the page you want to check.
Open Site Explorer provides a lot of great details about your link profile, but you will have to check for new backlinks manually every day.
Ahrefs Site Explorer
You can also use Ahrefs.com to search for backlinks.
Benefits:
- Great in depth details about your backlinks
- Shows New & Lost backlinks by days
- Graphics with your link building campaigns
How to use Ahrefs Site Explorer
Add the domain you want to check for backlinks and Ahrefs will return a detailed SEO report. To check for the latest backlinks, go to the left menu and click on “Backlinks – New”.
You can choose to see the new backlinks by the days they were indexed, from the top calendar.
Below you can see the table that contains all the backlinks from your chosen period of time. They are sorted by “Domain Rank”.
If you want to check the backlinks for all the pages of your website, add your URL on top, and select “URL with all its subpaths and query strings”.
Conclusion
To build a successful SEO campaign for your business, you have to track all the incoming links, just as often as you check your traffic and rankings.
These are the 3 best SEO tools that you can use to check and monitor your backlinks for your website.
The tools mentioned on this article are in no particular order. Each of them has many other features that can help you manage your SEO progress.
All of them have free versions for you to try.
