Backlink Checker

See every backlink your competitors have. SEO gets a lot easier when you can see what’s working for other people. Use the Backlink Checker to see what backlinks your competitors have, then adapt their content strategies to improve your own.

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Ranktracker is used by marketers from some of the world’s leading companies

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Get an instant backlink analysis for any domain

Enter any URL to see its current Domain Rating, URL Rating, total number of backlinks, ratio of dofollow/nofollow links, First seen & Last seen and more.

Take a deeper look at every competitor backlink

When you’re putting your competitors’ SEO under the microscope, you’ll want to know which links are really making a difference. Assess each link’s quality by viewing its Domain Rating, URL Rating, anchor text, ‘new’ or ‘lost’ status, dofollow/nofollow status, First seen & Last seen and more.

List of backlinks

Hone in on any website’s new and lost links

Backlink Checker search field with filtering tabs
Favourites list of saved backlinks

Save the best backlinks for later

When you find competitor backlinks that you want to try and replicate, save them to your favorites list for easy reference.

Backlink Checker

Backlink Checker With Historical and New/Lost Link Data

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You will know that backlinks are vital for rankings. Our Backlink Checker is easy to use and it will give you insights into who is linking back to your competition and the benefits they are getting. This allows you to focus on obtaining the key backlinks that will help you outrank your rivals. You can even steal backlinks with our exclusive lost link data.

Google and other search engines track these votes, and websites that get the most are listed higher in searches related to their content.

The effectiveness of backlinks is also helped by the fact that they require very little extra effort to accrue. If a website is posting quality, relevant content, then other websites will want to backlink to them as a way to raise their authority.

Let’s say you do search for ‘news’ on Google. There are thousands of news websites, with more opening every day. But you will always see the same few websites appearing at the top of the search ranking.

This is because these websites are known to be high-quality and high-authority. One of the main ways to achieve this authority is by collecting relevant backlinks.

Your main competitor's website will likely have a lot of organic backlinks. Smaller websites want to link to an authoritative website because it makes them look better and more trusted.

In this way, backlinks are a two-way relationship; when used correctly, backlinks will help to cement the linked websites' place in search rankings and help to build the smaller websites' reputation as credible sources of information.

To compete on the same level as these authoritative websites, you’ll want to emulate their backlinks…but, it’s impossible and unfeasible to track all of the backlinks that competitors receive manually.

This is where a backlink checker becomes essential. A backlink checker will automate the process of finding key competitor website backlinks, let you track websites to be notified of new backlinks, and more features; for example, see what percentage of these links are dofollow links.

The best backlink checkers will also have historical data and lost link data. Historical data will allow you to see the backlinks that a website had in the past, but has removed.

This is a key contextual tool that will help you to identify backlinks that your competitors have deemed to be low quality and help you to avoid generating these kinds of backlinks.

Lost link data will allow you to see where a website had a backlink, but the link is no longer accessible. This presents an opportunity for you, as it means that you can tailor content towards this backlink.

When the website goes to fix this lost link, they will see relevant content on your site and will use this in place of the old backlink from your competitor's website. That’s an easy win for you and your search metrics.

If you’ve been neglecting to research your competitors' backlinks, then now is the time to start. Effective use of a backlink checker will allow you to analyze where and why your competitors are succeeding at an intimate level.

A backlink checker is most commonly applied to your own website. You can, and should, use a backlink checker to monitor websites that link to you.

The main benefit of monitoring these backlinks is that you can identify low-quality backlinks and remove these quickly and effectively.

This is important because allowing disreputable sites to backlink to your site will make you lose authority, lose relevance in search rankings, and in the worst of scenarios have your website penalized.

Backlink checkers keep a comprehensive index of websites and can identify backlinks within these websites’ content. It’s important to choose a backlink tracker that has a comprehensive index, else you won’t be getting an accurate picture of the backlinks that your website has gained.

Another critical use case for a backlink checker involves using it as a competitor analysis tool. Competitor analysis is, of course, critical to building a brand and a reputation for your website.

A backlink checker will help you to achieve this by showing you essential information about the backlinks your competitors are receiving, and more importantly how they are responding to these backlinks.

Backlink checkers will vary in the amount of detail that they provide. Most will give you basic information, and then it is up to you how you interpret this.

However, the more time-efficient and cost-efficient move is to invest in an advanced backlink checker with features such as historical data and new/lost link checking. You can also find backlink checkers that come as part of a larger suite of SEO tools.

In this case, the backlink checker is designed to have flawless integration with these other tools, allowing you to streamline your SEO research and workflow.

Let’s break down what a backlink checker is on a technical level. To begin with, we need to understand how websites are cataloged on the internet.

Every website that is live right now, or has ever been live on the world wide web, is indexed. This means that a copy of the site is stored on a server, and this index will be periodically updated to give you the most accurate version of that website.

Indexing websites has several uses. First of all, an index acts as an archive. Some indexes, such as archive.org, index websites to preserve their information.

This is useful if the website is taken down years later, or somehow changed and old information that the website held needs to be retrieved. More commonly, an index is used to allow search engines to retrieve the website faster and more accurately.

At face value, a search engine might just seem like a tool that looks for websites that contain the keywords you input. This is something that most search engines can do, but the process of retrieving search results goes deeper than this.

Search engines such as Google have their reputation tracker for each website that it indexes. Through this, Google can determine which websites are trustworthy, and which are not. The high-quality websites will rise to the top of search rankings, as Google believes that these websites are the ones that users want to see.

Understandably, there would be riots if Google were to arbitrarily decide which websites are trusted and which are not, and therefore askew search results based on invisible criteria.

So, the method of determining which websites are instead based more so on data. One data point that google collects is backlinks.

A backlink is simply the process of website A linking to website B, usually naturally embedded through content such as blogs. These backlinks are what help to determine a website's credibility, and therefore search rankings. As such they are essential for SEO.

What a backlink checker will do, is scour the aforementioned indexes for any backlinks to a particular website that you ask it to retrieve information about. The checker achieves this by either accessing pre-existing indexes or keeping its index of websites.

In the case of the latter, the index gets larger and therefore smarter through user contribution and usage.

The first step to improving your search engine rankings through backlinks is, of course, being aware of their impact and using this to inform your competitor's research.

However, you still need to be aware of how you engage with information about your website’s backlinks or competitor backlinks.

These are two entirely different use-case scenarios, and as such will need different approaches and different tools. The only thing worse than not taking advantage of a backlink checker is using one poorly and ineffectively.

There are dozens, possibly hundreds of backlink checkers that exist. As discussed, a majority of these are free and basic tools. These are intended for the casual user. Someone who, for example, runs a hobbyist blog and is curious about the backlink performance of their website or of competing blogs.

Free backlink checkers are also often made available as a teaser to the full premium tools of an SEO suite. This is because backlink checkers are low-intensity to operate, and can be used within a web-browser.

By making a basic backlink checker free and building a user base through this free tool, users are integrated into the company ecosystem.

They are aware of the premium products that the company offers, and are more likely to purchase these thanks to the goodwill that has been built with users through allowing free use of the tool.

Unfortunately, when you’re trying to build a brand or build an authority website, these free checkers won’t cut it. They won’t give you access to the tools you need for substantial growth. For marketers and entrepreneurs, a premium backlink checker will be the right choice.

The difference in features between a premium backlink checker and a free backlink checker will be like night and day. But not only will you have more features available, but you will also have a more personalized experience. This can be achieved through the use of personal notifications, profiles, and more.

After the choice of a free backlink checker vs a premium one, it’s also important to choose the right backlink checker for your needs. First and foremost this should involve comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of different backlink checkers.

Do you want a backlink checker that can identify new competitor links in 1 - 2 days, but has a smaller index overall? Or would you rather use a backlink checker with a comprehensive index, but a much slower link retrieval process?

Still, trying to decide on the right backlink checker for you? We’d love to introduce you to the features of Ranktracker, our custom-built suite of SEO tools that includes a premium backlink checker.

Choose any of your competitor sites, big or small, and we’ll give you a breakdown of their backlink activity. By scanning our database of 2.7trillion links (and counting!), we can instantly tell you which sites have linked to your competitors. Our database is always learning and always updating.

Our backlink checker doesn’t stop at ‘what’. We’ll give you a full ‘who, where, and why’ profile of your competitor site’s backlink activity. This includes the hooks that other sites have used to link to your competitor, whether they used a nofollow or dofollow link, and more!

It’s not uncommon for backlinks to turn into lost links after a certain amount of time. This is where you can take advantage of this and take the place of lost links by creating relevant content. We’ll also continually search your competitor’s backlink profile for new links, and update this within 1 day.

What you want to know from backlinks, is how they’re contributing to your competitors' search rankings. With our comprehensive Domain Rating system, we’ll show you where your competitors are positioned related to other sites in our database. We’ll also give each site an overall URL rating, showing the quality of the backlinks they receive.

Want to further optimize which backlinks you should act on? You can save any interesting backlinks to be referenced later. All of the same, essential information will be available, regardless of when you view your saved backlinks again.

One of the strengths of backlink checkers is that they take the stress out of finding links. With a good backlink checker, you’ll have assistance in identifying which backlinks are most relevant to you and your website.

While backlinks are powerful, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Backlinks are a matter of quality over quantity. Focusing your efforts on receiving a lot of backlinks rather than crafting relevant and thoughtful backlinks will lead to your website’s reputation sinking.

In the same way that Google rewards authoritative websites, it can also penalize low-quality websites. This will happen if Google perceives the website as generating spam content, or otherwise misleading users.

In the worst-case scenario, Google can remove your website entirely from search indexes. This means that you won’t appear in search results at all, no matter how relevant a user's search is to your content.

Because of the number of websites that Google has to monitor for spam content, most of this filtering is done by an automatic system. These automatic systems are much stricter than a human can be, and they lack context. Anything that this automatic filter perceives to be spam will be immediately penalized.

It’s possible to dispute such penalties, but this is a process that can take weeks or even months. That’s thousands of valuable searches that you’re not appearing in.

Instead, you need to use tools such as backlink checkers to identify and create high-quality content that sites will want to backlink to.

The most essential advice for replicating backlinks is to spy on the backlinks that already exist. Look at the hooks that websites use to backlink to your competitors. Find the most common of these, and cement your place within the ranks of this type of content by producing content that leads to relevant backlinks.

You should also take advantage of the lost links of your competitors. These are backlinks that are free for the taking, and you know that there is demand for them because they’ve already been used by other sites.

It’s also beneficial to try and accrue niche backlinks. If you’re the only website that has backlink opportunities for a particular topic, that means that you’re going to be generating organic backlinks whenever another website writes about it.

Our backlink checker, which comes as part of our groundbreaking SEO suite Ranktracker, will help you to identify and take advantage of backlinks from your competitors. You’ll be spying on their digital presence, tracking every site that links to them and why.

Our context-aware tools will help you to identify which backlink opportunities you should act on, and which are safe to ignore.

The experience of using our backlink checker is entirely tailored to you and your website, meaning that you can prioritize the backlinks that are the most relevant to your brand.

If you’ve been left scratching your head, wondering what your competitor sites are doing to generate so much traffic, let us help you.

We’ll give you instant, custom-built reports about your competitor's backlink profile. The information we provide is easy to digest, and you have ultimate control over how you use what we find out.

Our domain ranking and URL ratings will position your site against your competitors, and your competitors against each other.

With an easy to understand system, you’ll be able to see which competitors you should be worrying about, and make them worry about you instead.

Our backlink checker is available through a structured pricing plan, which is flexible to the scale of your site and your goals. You can upgrade your plan or downgrade it at any time, no questions asked.

FAQ

First, start with a keyword that relates to the product or service you're selling (e.g., bread, tools). Then, enter that keyword into the Ranktracker search bar, and you'll be shown a long list of secondary keywords that you can use in addition to your primary keyword.

Ranktracker is one of the best keyword research tools on the market! Although there are some competitors who offer similar services, most of them aren't as fast as Ranktracker's and don't offer the same features.

Finding keywords is simple! For example, if you have an online shop that sells t-shirts, type "t-shirts" into Ranktracker's keyword finder, and you'll be shown a long list of keywords that relate to t-shirts.

The best keywords are relatively low competition keywords, but keywords that are trending and have a moderate search volume. These tend to be long-tail keywords that will be displayed in the Ranktracker keyword finder tool.

To research a keyword, simply type it into the keyword finder tool. You'll be displayed with all of the relevant information on that particular keyword including search volume, CPC/PPC cost, whether or not it's trending, and how difficult it is to rank for the keyword on a scale of 1 to 100.

Search volume is the number of people who search for that particular keyword in a month.

This is subjective to the niche you're in, but generally speaking, you want to find keywords that have a search volume that's greater than 10,000 searches per month but less than 150,000 searches per month. These tend to be low-competition keywords that you can easily rank in if you do your SEO right.

If you want to manually find the search volume for a certain keyword, you can use Google's free keyword planner. This can be found by creating a Google Adwords account and locating the keyword planner. It will display some basic data about monthly searches for popular terms.

A keyword between 500,000 and 1,000,000 searches is generally considered a "high" search volume. These niches are more competitive, and it will require more work to rank on the first page of Google.

Google's keyword planner is the best "free" keyword research tool. However, it only displays limited data and will not give you the full picture. You can try Ranktracker's keyword planner risk-free with a free 7-day trial!

Once you start doing your keyword research with Ranktracker's keyword planner, you'll be shown a list of various primary keywords that you can target along with a few long-tail keywords that you can target as secondary keywords.

Try to find keywords with a lower search volume (less than 150,000 searches per month) and keywords with a low keyword difficulty ranking (less than 50).

You can use Ranktracker's keyword finder for free with a free 7-day trial!

To calculate RS / KD , Ranktracker first collects the top 10 websites that rank organically for the keyword on the first page of Google.

Then, it calculates the ranking score for the first domain and the score for its page ranking for the keyword. These scores are based on the number of backlinks pointing to the domain and its page. They range from 0 (no backlinks detected) to 1,000 (highest rank).

Once it's done, the domain rank is multiplied by 0.1, and the page rank is multiplied by 0.9. The resulting values are added and then divided by 500.

((domain rating * 0.1) + (URL rating * 0.9)) / 500

The same calculation is performed for each of the ten domains and their pages.

After that, the Ranktracker sorts domains by rank value in ascending order and finds the median value.

0.2 is subtracted from the median. The resulting value is divided by 0.8

(median value – 0.2) / 0.8

The resulting value is multiplied by 100 to convert it to an integer (e.g., 0.6 * 100 = 60). If the value is greater than 1, it's truncated to 1.

What do people have to say?

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Vithurs, CEO, BlessedCBD

Vithurs

CEO, BlessedCBD

Ranktracker is solid product

With so many rank tracking tools available on the market today, it can be tricky finding "the one". After playing around with Ranktracker and discussing its various features with Felix, it's clear to me they have a solid product. For anyone still in doubt, they offer a 7 day free trial, which allows you to explore the tool before you make a decision!

Piotr S., Web Developer

Piotr S.

Web Developer

Better than expected

I used many platforms offering similar services, and I have paid an arm and a leg for it (figuratively saying). But in most of the cases, the features provided were mostly irrelevant to my or my client's needs, yet the full price would need to be paid monthly. With "Ranktracker," all is very simple "no muss no fuss", and all we need is in one place as and when required.

I was prepared for a hugely complicated dashboard full of confusing graphs and numbers that make no sense without spending days educating yourself on what is what and what it means. But to my surprise, none of it happened, all is very well constructed in a way that even a novice wouldn't have a problem understanding what they are looking at. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend at any time.

deals146, AppSumo user

deals146

AppSumo user

The perfect Rank Tracker!

Ranktracker gives me a very detailed overview of how my websites are ranking in search engines and how those rankings change over time. It also provides me an overview of my competition, which is very helpful for deciding where to focus my SEO efforts. I would recommend Ranktracker to anyone who is serious about SEO and wants to know the full picture of their website's ranking.

Sofea J., Blogger

Sofea J.

Blogger

Easy to Use Rank Tracking Tool with Awesome Capabilities

I love it that Ranktracker also provide keyword research function. This helps me compensate for my other keyword tool that relies on Google source and got certain keywords blacklisted. Its automatic rank tracking is awesome and frequently updated make it easy for me to track my progress. They even also provide email notification so that I am always notified of any changes to my rankings. Website audit is also on useful function that I use a lot to optimize everything within my power

Magnus S., Digital Marketer

Magnus S.

Digital Marketer

Excellent SaaS for rank tracking and keyword research!

My overall impression of RankTracker is quite obvious - it's really good. Worth mentioning too is their great support. It's a UK company and despite that it's in the middle of the night for them, they respond interactively in the customer support chat. I am amazed! So in all: Excellent product/service. Needs a few improvements in the website audit, but improvements are coming rapidly, the developers and the product management are really responsive to the customers and new features are launched often. My overall rating is 5 stars out of 5 possible.

laberare2, AppSumo user

laberare2

AppSumo user

A wonderful SEO platform

Ranktracker is a wonderful SEO platform for researching keywords and analyzing competition. The tool has a lot of different use cases and offers amazing features. I have used a lot of SEO tools and Ranktracker offers the best keywords that you can use to optimize your website. I always appreciate a company that gives good support with their products and Ranktracker excels in support. Make sure you don't miss this deal. Grab it, ask questions later.

Ederson V., Web designer

Ederson V.

Web designer

Excellent tool to monitor our website

I acquired the tool [...], and it is spectacular. Who would not like to reach the top of Google, because this tool has been giving me ideas of where I am in the Google Search Engine, the web page audit tool is fantastic; it shows us many details of arrangements that we must make in Our page to improve our positioning in the different search engines, shows us an Overview, a Health Check, Usability and Technologies, Pages Analysis, Meta-Analysis, Content Analysis, etc.

Marcos R., USMC

Marcos R.

USMC

A niche SEO tool I had to have!

Ranktracker gives you an invaluable tool to understand your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaigns. It will show you where you are currently ranked and where you should be ranked in comparison to your competitors. In addition to this, it will give you an idea of the changes you need to make to your website in order to improve your rankings.

Sumo-ling, AppSumo user

Sumo-ling

AppSumo user

Finally, a SEO tool for beginner agencies

I am a newbie agency and although I do have 2 years under my belt of SEO, I'm still pretty new but yet I want to offer good services and a robust tool. Ranktracker is really easy to use, great UX/UI and it has unlimited domains and awesome automated reports so I feel this tool is going to be amazing to help me grow my newbie agency!

Tang H., CEO

Tang H.

CEO

One of the best keyword tracking tools in the world

Ranktracker is the all-in-one platform for SEO that I was looking for. I love how it combines everything you need into one place, including rank tracking, keyword research, site testing, and more. The feature that impresses me the most is still rank tracking, I like its user interface and data fetching speed.

Michael M., CEO

Michael M.

CEO

Amazing SEO Keyword Software

Ranktracker provides me with a very detailed overview of how my websites perform in SEPR. It has a great interface and is very easy to use. The Keyword Finder, SERP Checker, and Website Audit tool are really amazing and full of details, which helps a lot to see the rating, and any SEO related issues that need to be fixed and adjust.

Kim C., Beginners Guitar Lessons

Kim C.

Beginners Guitar Lessons

Does More Than Rank Tracking

Lots of features, easy to set up and find keywords to track. Have a nice interface. They work hard on the tool and is commited to their users.

Not only is this a Rank Tracker tool, but it can also be used for Keyword research. I especially enjoyed its features for finding keywords and checking difficulty.

When setting up a site you get a list of keywords to put in the rank tracker, this makes it easy for someone who don't have any keywords tracked for their site yet.

Ryan C., CEO

Ryan C.

CEO

Was not impressed, until I bought it!

I feel this is straight forward and easy to use for beginner for SEO and Keyword research

I was initially not impressed with it, due to some reviews and questions asked are showing that the solution is not mature yet with some bugs and so on. However, after I tested out the trial, I decided to get it, since there is a refund period. I made the right choice! [...]

Ranktracker is used by marketers from some of the world’s leading companies

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