7 Free Backlink Checkers

Link building is one of the most important elements of an SEO campaign - obtaining quality backlinks from quality, relevant sites increases your trust score with Google and helps to move your website up the search engine rankings. It is important to monitor your link building efforts to keep track of what sites are linking to you. Crucially, you can also keep tabs on which sites are linking to your competitors - giving you ideas about sites to target with your link building campaign.

Below are 7 of the best, free backlink checkers which you can use to track links to your site and to your competitors. Each have their own unique features, so feel free to pick one or two favourites and use them.

SEO Pro’s Link Checker

This is my favourite backlink checker. Although it can sometimes be slow to load, it provides a wide range of useful information. This tool will show you the page rank of the linking page, how many links are on that page, and whether or not the link is nofollow. You also have the ability to check the number of backlinks for all of the pages on your site, or just the top domain.

Enter your competitors URL and look for sites linking to them from a high PR page. It may very well be worth enquiring if they would be happy to link to you in a similar manner.

Smart Page Rank’s Backlink Checker

This free tool checks the PR of all pages linking to a website, as well as the anchor text used.

SEO ToolBag’s Backlink Checker

This tool as well as providing the url, and page rank of the referring page, also informs you of the anchor text used in the link. After all the results are processed, it provides analytics of how often each anchor text is used. This is a very useful addition as it’s important to vary the anchor text you use when getting links to your website.

The Link Pop (We Build Pages’ Backlink Checker)

A very basic checker that gathers numbers from 4 different search engines for a very quick check.

iweb Tool’s Backlink Checke

A rather simple tool that displays the url of the page that links to you, and also the page rank of the refering page. It is very fast loading, but the downside is that you can only make 5 requests every hour unless you have a gold account, and every page of backlinks is counted as a request.

w3tool’s Backlink Checker

This tool is the best if you wish to compare sites, as it lets you check up 10 ten pages at a time. This is a great way to compare how many links your website has against your competitors.

dnScoop

Although the backlink checking function for this tool is pretty basic, it also provides you with lots of other useful information about your stie such as the domain name’s age, it’s page rank, it’s alexa (traffic) rank, it’s ip address and other sites hosted on the same ip address, the estimated value of a single link, and the estimated value of the domain name.