We all know the importance of backlinks and the role that link-building plays in improving your site’s keyword rankings and overall domain authority. 

 

However, if you’re outsourcing link building to an agency or doing this yourself, you want to ensure that the links you get are of a good, high quality standard. 

 

Monitoring your site's backlinks is essential for seeing the results of your SEO and link-building efforts, reclaiming valuable lost links, spying on your competitors, and for protecting your site from negative SEO attacks.

 

We've just launched our new Backlink Monitoring tool to automatically track and update you on changes to your backlink profile. 

 

Note: Backlink Monitoring is only available for White Label and Embedding users. 

monitor backlinks using seoptimer

 

Here are some of the things you can do with our tool:

 

  • Track you or your competitors backlink profile.
  • Visually see New and Lost links for up to a year ago in our intuitive Backlink Monitoring dashboard.
  • View changes (New and Lost links) to your backlink profile on a daily basis.
  • Check changes in your link profile over 4 different time periods: Monthly, Weekly, Quarterly, or Yearly.
  • Switch between Backlinks vs Referring Domains to get a more granular view of changes.
  • Add a site and schedule alerts that gives you a weekly or monthly email digest of backlink changes.

 

Why Monitor Backlinks with SEOptimer

See the Successes of Your SEO

Monitoring your site’s backlinks is essential if you want to have a clear understanding of the successes of your link-building. 

 

Like with tracking keyword rankings, backlink monitoring is all about seeing the measurable results of your marketing and SEO activities. 

 

One of the core features and primary use cases of our Backlink Monitoring software is to see how your link profile grows and changes over time. 

 

Simply add your website’s URL and watch how our tool finds all of your site’s backlink changes for up to a year ago. This includes both new and lost links.

Track Your Competitor’s Link Building Results

By actively monitoring your competitor’s backlinks, you can reverse engineer their link-building strategy. 

 

For instance, if you notice that a competitor is consistently gaining contextual dofollow links from other local businesses in your community, it could indicate that they are creating guest posts on these websites. 

 

You could then reverse engineer their strategy to create a similar link-building plan for your business.

 

Monitoring your competitor’s backlinks is as simple as going to the Backlink Monitoring tab on the left of your SEOptimer dashboard, and adding the URL you’d like to monitor. 

Identify Negative SEO Attacks

Furthermore, by monitoring your link profile, you’ll quickly realize if your site is getting hit with a negative SEO attack. 

 

Negative SEO is when another site builds spammy, low-quality backlinks to your website with the goal of negatively affecting your link profile. 

 

You can easily identify negative SEO attacks by clicking on the “New Backlinks” tab in the Backlink Monitoring dashboard. 

 

Here you will see useful data points such as:

 

  • Domain Strength
  • Page Strength
  • Anchor
  • Title
  • Link Type
  • Whether the new link is an image link or a text link
  • URL From
  • URL To
  • Follow/Nofollow

 

To identify a negative SEO attack simply sort the Domain Strength column from low to high. This will sort the backlink table from sites with a low to a high Domain Strength score. 

 

Now just because a site with a low Domain Strength score has linked one of your pages doesn’t mean that it’s part of a negative SEO attack.

 

You also need to look at the anchor text that is being used. Most negative SEO attacks can be identified because the attacker used the same exact match or unnatural anchor texts. 

Recover Lost Links

Another reason why monitoring backlinks is so important is so that you can recover lost or removed links as soon as possible. 

recover lost backlinks

 

If you notice that a domain has removed a link to your website, then you can contact the webmaster to try and get the link fixed or added back. 

 

Our tool will send you a weekly email digest containing a list of all the links gained and lost over the last 7 days. 

 

Pay special attention to the links that you lost, if you notice that you’ve lost any valuable links from high-quality websites, try contacting the webmaster as soon as possible to get the link reinstated. 

 

How to Monitor Backlinks using SEOptimer

 

Now that you know the importance of monitoring backlinks, let’s discuss how you can set up backlink monitoring using SEOptimer. 

 

First, login to your SEOptimer account and click on the “Backlink Monitoring” tab on the left.

backlink monitoring tab

 

Then, add your website’s URL and choose whether you’d like to receive an email summary of backlink changes on a weekly or monthly basis. 

add website to backlink monitoring

 

You can also choose to receive no email if desired, although I’d strongly suggest against this if you want to stay updated on changes. 

 

Once done, click on “Add Website”. 

 

Our tool will then add your chosen website to your Backlink Monitoring dashboard where you can see all of the URLs you’re monitoring along with high-level backlink metrics such as Domain Strength, Backlinks, Referring Domains, New Backlinks, Lost Backlinks, and Email Alert frequency.

 

Next, click on the website that you’ve added in your Backlink Monitoring dashboard. You’ll be redirected to an interface where you’ll see more in-depth data.

 

Starting from the top, you’ll see a few settings on the right side of the page.

backlinks and referring domains tab

 

Here you can switch between viewing changes for Backlink or Referring Domains. It’s set to view Backlinks by default, but you can switch to Referring Domains if want to want to see changes for Referring Domains only.

 

Want to know whether you need to focus on backlinks or referring domains? Check our article on Backlinks vs Referring Domains to learn which is more important.

 

You can also choose to view data for a period of 1 Week, 1 Month, 3 Months, or 1 Year. 

 

Lastly, you can also change the email alert frequency by clicking on the blue settings icon.

 

Now, if you scroll down you’ll see a summary of backlink changes. Here you can see the following metrics:

 

  • Domain Strength
  • Total Backlinks
  • Referring Domains
  • New Backlinks
  • Lost Backlinks

backlinks changes

 

Scrolling down you’ll see a chart that visually shows you backlink changes over the desired period. 

backlink changes chart

 

This is useful if you want to get a quick snapshot of how your link-building efforts are going. 

 

You can see changes to your link profile, links gained or lost, on a daily basis by just hovering over each of the individual bars on the chart. 

 

Now, if you scroll down to the bottom of the interface, you’ll see even more detailed information pertaining to your backlink changes. 

 

At the top of the table you can choose to view All Backlink Changes, New Backlinks, or Lost Backlinks. 

backlink changes table

 

Here’s a breakdown of all the backlink information you can view in this table:

 

  • Type: shows you if a link is New or Lost.
  • Domain Strength: our score reflecting a referring domain’s authority.
  • Page Strength: our score reflecting a specific page’s authority.
  • Anchor: the anchor text the referring domain is using to link to your website.
  • Title: the title of the referring page.
  • Link Type: indicates whether a link directly points to your site (href) or through a redirect.
  • Image: shows if the incoming link is an image link (true) or not (false).
  • URL From: the exact URL of the incoming link.
  • URL To: the page to where the link is pointing to.
  • Follow/Nofollow: shows whether a link has a dofollow or nofollow attribute.
  • First Seen: the date when the link was first seen by our software.
  • New/Lost Date: the date when the link was added or removed.
  • Reason Lost: this column will give the reason the link was lost. 

 

As you can see, there’s a tonne of valuable insights that can be gleaned from this data. Imagine having to find all of this information manually. 

 

Monitor Competitor Backlinks

 

One of the other benefits of using our Backlink Monitoring software is that you can keep an eye on your competitor’s backlink profile and link-building efforts.

 

Spying on your competitor’s backlink profile can give you an idea of where they are getting their best links from, and how you can replicate those strategies for your own link-building.

 

To monitor competitor backlinks, simply follow the same process as you did when adding your own domain. 

 

Wrapping Up

 

If you’re serious about improving your site’s domain authority and SEO performance, you need to keep a close eye on your backlink profile as you build new links to your site.. 

 

Our Backlink Monitoring tool is ideal for small business owners, marketers, and SEOs who want to see their backlink changes. 

 

As most customers would know by now, we are powered by your direct feedback and product suggestions so please reach out to us on Twitter @seoptimer or submit feature requests and upvote features you want on our Feature Request board.