Top 5 Free Backlink Checker SEO Tool [2023]

Backlinks are critical aspects of SEO campaigns

In this blog post, we will look at the list of Best Free Backlink Checker tools for SEO that one can use for an effective link building strategy

1. SEO SpyGlass – Free Backlink Checker

SEO SpyGlass is a totally Free backlink checker tool that has a massive backlink database and crawls over 7.1 billion web pages daily

Its massive backlink database enables you to keep an eye on all your backlinks and referring domains.

You can manage the backlink analysis by dividing it into categories thus enhancing easy backlink management.

SEO SpyGlass backlink checker tool has the below features : 

1. Identify Web pages with the highest number of backlinks

2. Identify Web pages that may be subjected to penalty risk from Google

3. Historical Module to show How your backlink profile has evolved over time

4. Domain Comparison to analyze the Competitor Backlink profile

5. Link Intersection Feature ( Similar to Ahrefs) to see common backlinks you and your competitor has

SEO Spyglass helps you consolidate the backlinks from various sources like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

It notifies you of the spam links whenever found, and you can easily disallow those spammy backlinks thus ensuring you only have good backlinks pointing to your site

SEO Spyglass can also generate customizable backlink reports. The paid plan allows white-label reports for a backlink profile

Enterprise SEO Professionals can have access to the API and fetch up to 200,000 backlinks and create custom dashboards 

With truly unlimited features for Free, SEO SpyGlass gives other SaaS SEO tools a run for their money.

This affordable backlink checker tool with a free version deserves all the respect and thus, it has made it to the top of our list

2. SEMrush Backlink Audit Tool – Free 7 Day Trial

SEMrush is a backlink checker tool that provides you with fast and efficient results about the new links which are showing up only within 15 minutes

With SEMrush Backlink Checker and Analysis tool, one can 

1. Track Backlinks of any Domain and its Link Building Progress

2. Perform Link analysis and check all Inbound links and Linking Domains

3. Understand the link authority of Referring Domain

4. Identify Domain Competitors

I love the various filters and options they have to Anchors/Referring Domains and Outbound Domains

See Below :

The Backlink Filter shows the count of backlinks along with Types and Link Attributes Analysis

With the Filters,  you can check the New vs Lost vs Active Link analysis

SEMrush enables you to conduct deep link analysis, where you will be able to detect incoming backlinks, search URLs, domains, and anchors, and also detect backlink types.

Semrush generates an Authority Score is based on numerous data sources like Actual traffic thus providing you with a secure Authority Score, away from the spammy and low-quality backlinks.

Additionally:

You get successful ideas by diving into your competitor’s marketing strategies and this will enable you to get information about your competitor backlink profile

You will be able to track the backlink progress of any domain, get notified about deleted backlinks, mark the date of both lost and found backlinks

There’s more to it.

Semrush enables you to discover backlink opportunities by identifying mentions of your brand and your competitor’s brand in real-time! 

It also shows you the Domain Competitors.

Every data set can be exported in form of a CSV file Backlink Checker report

Semrush Backlink checker is totally free with limited information. 

In case you want to explore the complete capabilities, get a Free 7 Day trial of Semrush here and perform the Deep Link analysis

3. SE Ranking – 14 Days Free Free Backlink Checker

SERanking is a Free backlink analysis tool that helps you plan strategies for link building based on the analysis of backlinks data.

With more than 2.7 Trillion Backlinks in its database, SE Ranking crawls 25 Thousand pages each second making the Backlink Analysis very strong

Se Ranking is my personal Favourite has a Free Backlink Checker and Free Backlink Monitor

You will be able to get SEO data metrics of your backlink profile like : 

1. Domain trust – Measure of Domain Backlink profile Quality
2. Page trust – Measure the ranking potential of particular pages
3. Referring domains
4. Dofollow/Nofollow ratio
5. First Seen/Last Seen

SE Ranking Backlink Checker has Features like :

1. Analyze the highlighted backlinks on a webpage by referring to domains and the origin of most of the links based on IPs and subnets

2. SE Ranking Backlink Monitor tells you the date when your backlinks had been last tracked via a search engine ranking crawler.

3. Analyse Anchor text Spread across the Referring Domains and Backlinks

4. Identify Pages that are frequently linked to

Additionally : 

SE Ranking has a feature of adding high target backlinks to the Backlink Monitor so that you can trace their status each day.

What I Love about SE Ranking is : 

1. You get an opportunity of building new links in a very short period just by providing your competitor’s website’s link and helps in tracing out the links who have not yet connected with you but are in contact with your competitor.

2. Along with Backlink Checker, you also get the SE Ranking Keyword Research Tool

Best Part: 

The Free version of the SE Ranking Backlink Checker tool is available for 14 Days at Zero Cost

All you have to do is Sign up for SE Ranking here for Free – No Credit Card Required and Start using the Tool

Along with a Free version, SE ranking is a Cheap SEO tool and starts at the low price of $18/Mo.

My personal suggestion is this SEO tool should be definitely explored

4. Ahrefs Backlink Checker 

Ahrefs is one of the Best Backlink checker tools which provides Domain Rating (DR) & URL Rating that helps you judge the backlink popularity of your competitor’s website. 

However, the Free Ahrefs Backlink Checker restricts the use of the Filters. You still can check the Top 100 Backlinks, Top 5 anchors, and Top 5 pages. 

Free Ahrefs Backlink tool can show the Dofollow vs NoFollow analysis along with referring Domains for Dofollow.  links

Ahrefs has one of the largest backlink indexes that can help us with a complete breakdown of your competitors backlink profile where you can check out every single page linked with your competitor along with broken outbound links and also the outbound linking anchor texts.

Ahrefs allows to track the growth or decline of the Backlink profile over time as in the number of new backlinks added or lost, and also check the quality of backlinks.

One can also track the Growth of 

1. Referring Domains

2. Referring Pages

3. New and Lost Referring Domains

4. New and Lost Backlink

Ahrefs has powerful filters like Language sorting, link types, referring domains, DR, UR, and platforms for a better insight. 

You will be able to track the organic traffic count for each linking page and also the Ahrefs Rank(AR).

If you get to know of suspicious backlink behaviors, Ahrefs allows you to add spammy links to disavow files directly from the tool and easily import the file to Google’s Disavow Tool.

5. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest from Neil Patel is a free backlink checker tool that helps you perform backlink analysis and identify the weaker aspects of your link building Strategy

Ubersuggest has advanced filters that segregate information based on region, anchor text, domain score, page score, and URL.

You are also allowed to restrict the results to be displayed as one backlink for each domain, and once you have organized the results, you can export them easily to CSV.

With a Simple and Clean UI, Ubersuggest is a great free SEO tool to start your SEO Journey

Why are Backlinks important?

Backlinks ( Incoming Links, Inbound Links)  are links to your website from a different website. Backlinks help you improve your website ranks on Search Engines. 

if these links are coming from quality websites, these links can be considered as positive ratings for your website.

More the number of ratings your website, the higher will be the rank of your website on the Search Engines. 

A higher ranking of your website signifies a much higher value, credibility, and usefulness of your website content.

Backlinks are the foundation of Google’s original algorithm are also of the most important Search Engine ranking factors. 

Your site’s backlink from a highly authoritative website can fetch your site a much higher ranking than other 1000 lower quality backlinks.

Why should you Monitor your Backlinks?

Monitoring your backlink profile would help you attain a larger amount of actual traffic and check if there is a toxic backlink that points to your website. 

Quality backlinks can raise your website ranking effectively, on the other hand, Toxic ( or bad) backlinks can lead to your website getting banned.

Having bad backlinks also affects your website’s reputation, and may subject you to vulnerabilities and penalties.

Apart from looking for ways to increase traffic on your website, you need to be aware of the spammy and toxic links too.

Monitoring your backlink count is highly necessary when it comes to investing money in companies providing SEO services because not all companies provide highly recognized backlinks.

Why should you check the Backlinks of your competitor?

Checking your competitor website’s  backlinks would help you to effectively build a link building strategy like writing high-quality content for improving your website rankings

If your competitor site has around a thousand backlinks on average and you have less than the average links, then you can certainly work on increasing the number of backlinks on your website by putting more relevant content.

You should keep a track of your competitor’s increasing and decreasing performances so that you can improve your performance and compete efficiently.

Checking a competitor’s backlinks helps you plan out efficient strategies to be followed by your website to compete with your competitors.

 You will be able to analyze the quality as well as the number of sites keeping in touch with your competitors.

However, while checking competitor backlinks, you must consider the fact that having a link from a highly authoritative website is much more valuable.

Backlink Checker vs Backlink Monitor – What to Use and When?

Backlink Monitor helps us track New backlinks and identify the Lost Backlinks

With Backlink Monitors, we can add website backlinks to the monitor list and get notified of any changes. For example, if a website has been removed a backlink to your page, you can get notified of this change and reach the website owner to add it back. 

Backlink Checkers on other hand help you with Competitor Backlink analysis and implement a link Outreach Strategy

Final Thoughts – Backlink Checker Tools and Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are very critical for better SERP results

While choosing the right Backlink checker tool, make sure you know the Domain and Page-level  metrics these Backlink analysis tool measures

For Example, SE Ranking has Page trust and Domain Authority metric while Ahrefs has URL Rating ( UR) and Domain Rating (DR)

For starters, a paid backlink checker will be costly. We recommended using the Free Backlink Checkers like SEO Spyglass or SE Ranking as Ahrefs has limitations and the free version may not give the entire picture

If your website is big and you have large teams that need Enterprise SEO metrics, then check out the Enterprise SEO tools that you may need