Top 5 Backlink Analysis Tools And When To Use Them

Hello. Today I’m going to talk about my top five Backlink analysis tools. Now, these are the tools that I use every time I’m carrying out a Backlink analysis or a link audit. There are many more out there, but these are just the ones I choose to use every time because they help you to get a better understanding of the big picture when it comes to your link profile.

Now, there’s no single tool out there to date that can give you 100% of your link data. So, these tools will go out there and find as much information as they can but ultimately they’re only going to be giving you a small percentage of your actual data, which is why it’s important to use as many different tools as possible so you can get as much information as possible and collate it, remove the duplicates and then analyse as much as you can.

So, to start with Webmaster tools, now there are two types of Webmaster tools that I use regularly and that’s Google’s and Bing’s Webmaster tools. Now Google Webmaster tools in particular is useful if you’ve been hit with a manual penalty. So, if you’ve had a warning in Webmaster tools about spam then using the link data from Webmaster tools in Google is really useful because it gives you some insight as to some of the links that they’re aware of. It won’t actually give 100% of the links that Google has found and there may be unnatural links out there that Google is aware of but they’re not sharing with you, unfortunately, but it definitely gives you a good amount of insight.

You can get things like anchor text data, referring domain data and actual sample links for you to go and examine. So it’s really important to get as much data out of those tools as possible so that you can analyse your profile and get a better understanding of the quality of your links. Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer are quite similar in concept and they will go out and crawl the web to find those links and that information about them.

You can get things, again, like anchor text information, referring domains, referring IP’s, lots of other information for you to analyse and by exporting the data from these top three tools you can collate a big picture when it comes to your links and get a better understanding. It might be that Open Site Explorer finds links that the other two don’t and vice versa. So, it’s really important you use as many tools as possible to get all that data.

Now, Link Risk and Link Detox. These are a little bit different to the tools above. They’re similar to each other but very different in nature because what these do is actually give you some analysis yourself. Rather than going off finding a load of links for you to analyse, they actually go some way to analysing them for you. Now each of these tools will give you a rating of your overall link profile quality and give you sums of how many bad links it thinks it found, how many healthy ones, how many suspicious ones and it will analyse each link and categorise it in that sort of way.

Now, this gives you some great insight and it means that it does a little bit of the work for you. Now don’t take their analysis at face value because ultimately it is a tool and it’s not going to be perfect. Some links that they think are really healthy, might be quite unnatural and vice versa, so it’s real important you still analyse the data but it just gives you a really nice place to start and they’re really useful tools for collecting more data and more analysis and saving you a little bit of work.

So all in all, I strongly recommend that if you think you’ve been hit by a manual penalty or perhaps by Penguin or any other reason to suspect that your link profile is anything other than completely natural, I would suggest using all of these tools to get the big picture of your links and then manually analysing the data that comes back. These are my top five for that reason.

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