Building backlinks is a complicated process. Using a free backlink checker tool is one of the easiest ways to discover what you can do to boost your backlink profile. It can help you to conduct link research on both you or your competitors’ sites.

You will learn:

• The basic information about backlink and link-building
• How to check your backlink and know your current profile
• Way to use a backlink checker – BacklinkGap

If you want to rank on Google, you have no choice but to build links. 

However, link building is time-consuming and hard. As you may have guessed it, you’ve got lots of work to do. Research, analyze, create, reach out, and be consistent. Thus, you also need to track whether your link profile and traffic improve.

Manually checking and evaluating your backlinks is always going to be a boring process. So a backlink checker is designed and created for you. 

Choose the best free backlink checker for your site’s needs and allow it to automate the process for you. 

In this article, we will show you basic information about backlinks. You will also get to know a great tool – BacklinkGap. 

Let’s start with the definition.

Definition: Backlink and Link Building

A backlink, also known as an external backlink, is when another site links to your website somewhere in their content. This could be on a blog post, a service page, or on any other page on a website. 

Backlinks are the currency of the web. The websites that have plenty of them are deemed “authoritative” and are rewarded with high rankings in Google. While websites that don’t have any are bound to obscurity. 

Backlinks are important for SEO. The amount of authentic, high-value backlinks that you have back up the quality of the content on your website. Search engines like Google use the quality and number of backlinks as a ranking signal. 

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your own website. The purpose of link building is to boost the “authority” of your pages in the eyes of Google, so that these pages rank higher and bring more search traffic.

Why is building backlink important?

According to Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the three major ranking factors in Google. Acquiring backlinks is a fundamental strategy in SEO. If you want your website’s pages to rank high in search, you will almost certainly need links.

Google (and even other search engines) look at backlinks from other sites as “votes.” These votes help them identify which page on a given topic (out of thousands of similar ones) deserves to be ranked at the very top of the search results. Do you know that the top results on Google’s first SERP have 3.8 times more backlinks than those below them?

The numbers of backlinks you actually need to land on the first page of Google results is enough to make most marketers give up.

Even the ninth and tenth positions have an average of over 30,000 backlinks.

Just having a backlink alone isn’t enough to rank high in the SERPs. The backlink has to be of good quality as well. A single good-quality backlink is worth thousands of low-quality backlinks. So, let’s move to the information about quality backlinks.

Information about backlinks

Common types of backlinks

Normally, you will see the most common names of backlinks “Dofollow” and “Nofollow.” 

Dofollow backlinks are the most common and valuable type of backlink for SEO.

When you put a dofollow link on your website, you’re telling Google that the link is organic — as in, the target website didn’t buy the link—and that you’re vouching for the accuracy of the content at the other end of that link.

Dofollow is simply telling Google and the other search engines that “the content on the other end of this link is important and should be noted.”

Nofollow backlinks are less common. They’re also less valuable. They’re used to telling search engines to ignore a particular link.

This is Google’s official definition of a nofollow tag, “Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.’”

The biggest difference between these two types of links is that Google places more value on dofollow links — which means they’re great for SEO. Nofollow links, on the other hand, are paid less attention by Google’s algorithm in most cases. That means they’re arguably less valuable for SEO.

In general, both types pass the value to your site. We can assume that dofollow links are more valuable, but at the same time having only followed links is not “natural” in Google’s eyes (You will know more about the natural quality right after this.)

That’s why you need to monitor both your dofollow/nofollow distribution.

What makes good backlinks

There are some general concepts of evaluating links that the SEO community believes to be true. 

#1. Authority: 

Page authority refers to the original Google’s PageRank algorithm. The basic idea behind is super simple: the page with more links pointing at it casts a stronger vote. 

A common SEO rookie mistake is to neglect link opportunities from low-authority websites as if they’re somehow detrimental to your SEO success. It’s not. Just like a newly published page can acquire backlinks over time, a low-authority website can become a big deal in a few years time.

#2. Relevance:

Let’s say you own a blog about cake and you publish a review of your favorite macaroon recipe. Later, two of your friends decide to link to it. One from their “10 Best Easy Cake Recipes” article and the other from their “10 Money-saving Tips” article. Which of the two pages would cast a stronger vote in the eyes of Google (given that both these pages have equal authority)? 

#3. Natural:

Backlinks should be natural. The website owner chooses to link to your site because it provides value to their readers; not because you paid them to do so or tried to manipulate them. This natural approach is an example of ‘earning’ a backlink. This differs from unnatural backlinks where the intent is usually to fool search engines into believing that a website has a better reputation than it really does.

If Google believes a backlink is unnatural or spammy, Google may ignore it at first. For repeat offenses, Google will punish the site and demote them in its search engine results.

#4. Placement: 

One other thing that can affect the CTR (click-through rate) of a link is how high it appears on the page. Readers are more likely to follow links at the very beginning of the article, rather than the ones at its very end. 

And of course, the more links you have on the page, the more they will compete with each other for clicks and thus, dilute the authority which will be transferred to other pages.

#5. Destination: 

When building links to your website, there are three destinations where you can point them:

• Your homepage;
• Your linkable assets;
• The pages that you actually need to rank high in Google

And quite often the pages that you need to rank well are also the hardest ones to get links to. That’s because people prefer to link to informational pages where their audience can get value for free, instead of commercial pages where their audience is likely to part ways with their cash.

Make sure that you link to the right sites and not waste your backlinks.

How to check your backlinks

Being able to see your backlink distribution can also help you identify potential problems. You need to know how you are doing, what problem you are facing, and what you need to gain more backlinks.

A backlink checker is a tool that can help you do a lot of SEO backlink work.

Backlink Checker: 

A backlink checker can help you monitor your backlink profile so you are immediately notified when any poor-quality sites link to you. 

It also provides an understanding of potential link-building opportunities so that you can gain more positive inbound links that will benefit your site. Since you can monitor which pages are gaining positive backlinks, you will also have a better idea about which content is resonating the most with your audience.

There are a number of tools in the industry. It might be confusing when you are looking for the best free tool on the internet. Don’t worry. We are going to introduce you to one of the best tools that you can use for free – BacklinkGap.

Our favorite tool: BacklinkGap

What you can do with BacklinkGap to discover your backlink profile:

• Evaluate your backlink’s profile strength
• Identify if your backlinks are “dofollow” or “nofollow”
• Uncover your most common type of backlinks
• Get all-time backlink data

BacklinkGap has a simple interface. You just need to enter your domain or URL, and this is what you will see:

You can get a huge amount of useful data like the number of backlinks, friendship score, total referring domain, new & lost backlinks, and so on.

BacklinkGap also provides you information if you want to know more about the types and attributes, .

Overall, BacklinkGap has 9 outstanding things you can discover:

• Backlink profile strength: You can see the value and authoritativeness of all your backlinks. The friendship score stands for the number & the quality of backlinks you have.
• New and lost backlinks: You can be instantly informed of any gain or loss in your list of backlinks. This is like a real-time alarm that tells you what you need to pay attention to fix.
• Backlink Monitoring: BacklinkGap has this feature to help you identify the movement of all the backlinks pointing to you.
• Referring domain: You can uncover where your backlinks come from and the quality and trustworthiness of them.
• Backlink anchor text: This helps you to learn how your backlinks are labeled and the common keywords pointing at you
• Shareable link report: This feature allows you to share your backlink report easily and instantly. As the picture illustrates, you can adjust how the report displays by filtering or choosing the number of rows.

• Manage disavowed links: You can efficiently identify and compile unwanted backlinks to disavow.
• Broken links: The tool will recognize all the broken backlinks to your website and you will know where to reach out to patch them up.
• Identify spammy websites: You can even uncover suspicious domains that might be practicing spammy backlinks from your backlink profile.

BacklinkGap gives you free access to most of the data to know your backlink profile. However, you can get much more accessible if you upgrade with premium features, such as more number of backlink checker rows, monitoring rows, and the ability to export CSV files.

What to do after checking your backlinks

You can not just know your backlink profile and do nothing.

If you want to keep improving, you must analyze the data from the SEO backlink tool and find the next solutions. Backlink analysis is a comprehensive review of a website’s backlinks to analyze the site’s performance and identify issues that could affect its search engine ranking. 

You can regain the lost links:

A good tool gives you information not only on the recently gained but also recently lost links. When you know where the problem is, you can regain lost links and ultimately keep good link juice flowing to your site.

Has your link been deleted in particular? Was the web page deleted? Is it a 404’ed page? Find the issue, and get those links back!

You can use link-building tactics to gain more backlinks:

There’s no single right approach to link building and your choice of tactics will largely depend on your industry, your website, your resources, and your goals.

Conceptually, most link building tactics and strategies fall into one of the following four buckets: 

Manually add links to websites.

If you can go to a website that doesn’t belong to you and manually place your link there, that’s called “adding” a link. The most common tactics that fit into this category are:

• Business directory submissions;
• Social profile creation;
• Blog commenting;
• Posting to forums, communities & Q&A sites;
• Creating job search listings;

Building links via those tactics is very easy to do. And for that exact reason, those links tend to have very low value in the eyes of Google

Reach out to website owners directly to ask for a link.

You can start by reaching out to the blog’s owner and building a relationship. You can sign up to any newsletters they offer, follow them on social media, leave comments on their blog posts… In general, the more you give, the more you will get back.

Request to put up a guest post after establishing your relationship with them and demonstrating that you have things that are worth saying.

Get organic links from people who visited your page.

You “earn” links when other people link to pages on your website without you having to ask them to do so. 

This obviously doesn’t happen unless you have something truly outstanding that other website owners would genuinely want to mention on their websites.

But people can’t link to things that they don’t know exist. So no matter how awesome your page is, you’ll need to invest in promoting it. And the more people see your page, the higher the chance that some of them will end up linking to it.

Exchange money for links.

Umm… Yes. You can actually buy for backlinks. You just need to spend money and get a number of backlinks with that. BUT, don’t do that if you really want to rank top on the SERPs with quality traffic.

Even when you buy links, Google can spot it out and your content in the eye of the search engine will be marked.

You must keep monitoring your backlinks

A good link management tool allows you to also monitor exactly what you are doing.

One of the most profitable things you can do with your link data improves your SEO. This is just what the whole game is about, right?

Ultimately, we use data to make an informed decision about certain issues — and it’s the same case here. If your goal is to increase the traffic to your website, you need to build links. And to build links, you need to find those opportunity gaps. You should not keep your eye out of this backlink work. It doesn’t mean that you need to sit and see the data and charts day by day. 

With a backlink checker like BacklinkGap, you can get your report daily, weekly or monthly, and analyze it afterward.

TL;DR

Using a backlink checker isn’t optional in the current SEO landscape. Knowing as much about the people linking to your site is imperative. How to check backlinks of a site can be a hefty task; however, the work pretty much becomes simpler with such a backlink checker. 

The free backlink checker tool listed – BacklinkGap will give you a good look at the profile your site has built online. With free access, you can see a complete link profile overview with the in-depth analysis you may need.