Understanding the number of websites pointing to your website and action based on that is very crucial as many times this helps your website to perform exceptionally good on search engines, always holding your keywords SERP on the top fold of google first page. Meanwhile, there are very high chances of wrong domains pointing to your website and this may affect your website performance and in some cases may also lead to the penalty.

Understanding the backlinks to your website helps in the following ways:

• Prioritizing and deprioritizing the link building activity for a specific set of landing pages
• Helps in prioritizing the links from specific location
• Helps in prioritizing the activities from specific kinds of websites, as building links from some random website may not help
• Helps you to remove the bad/spam links that are pointing to your website and affecting your website performance
• Understanding the backlink data also helps during the relative studies of web pages/keywords performance with respect to the backlinks pointing the website
• The naturally acquired backlinks may help you in prioritizing such similar activities to acquire more and more backlinks naturally.
• Helps you to understand which is a do-follow link and which is a no-follow link
• Regular monitor of backlinks also help you to understand the lost links and gained backlinks, and understanding this is very important as many times your web pages must be performing on search results purely with the push of those one or two domains and when you lose a link and if you see a drop in rankings this one thing can also be the reasons, and you finding a solution for this very much needed in order to not to have any kind of loss.

There are so many good things that happen when you put an effort in understanding the backlinks pointing to your website and moreover this is a must activity that every SEO professional should practice doing it at frequent intervals.

Here are some of the important backlink checker tools that could help you to check the website backlinks:

Google Webmaster Tools (Webmaster external links data):

Webmaster tools are one of the best tools that every SEO professionals have to use and understand, webmaster tools give you a lot of insight to various kinds of data and this is the most reliable data that any SEO professional can rely on.

If your website is small and has got backlinks from very few domains, lets say less than 1000 domains then webmaster tools will be the perfect tool to rely on, meanwhile when you have too many domains, lets say few thousands pointing to your domain in those cases webmaster tools serves you the list of top domains, usually the domains those are providing too many backlinks in very short intervals. Webmaster tools provide you a sampling data.

Although you are allowed to find the recent backlinks, history, and lost links still all of it is a sample data.

Here are the steps to find backlinks on webmaster tools, we are updating here with the new tools details as webmaster tools is completely moved to its new version.

1. Login to your webmaster account
2. Pick the account you want to explore
3. The default view will be an overview of the account
4. Explore the left side navigation on the tool interface
5. You will come across various sections such as Index, enhancements, security, and manual actions and right just below that you will find a section that helps you with the data you are looking for
6. Links is the section which you should be exploring to check the backlinks pointing to your website, this particular section serves lost of details such as internal links, external links, most linked pages, top linked text, and top linking sites.
7. Top links sites are the section that you should be exploring to check the backlinks
8. Click on the more under the top linking sites and you will find the complete list of domains pointing to your website and the number of backlinks each website is providing to your website.
9. You can download to an excel and process it for better understanding.

Webmaster tools provide you very accurate data when compared to any third party tools, third-party tools algorithms, their serves, and their crawling frequency and process are completely different from the Google crawlers. Meanwhile, webmaster tools can provide you only sample data and hence you may have to rely on third-party tools when you have a massive number of domains pointing to your website.

Majesticseo.com

Majestic SEO is one of the biggest crawler and which is the second biggest crawler after Google, this crawler data is very much comparable to Google crawlers, as this seems to have a process very much similar to Google process and hence the backlinks and the referring domain’s data you get is incomparable with Google many times, but for sure majesticSeo provides you the complete details of referring domains.

Majesticseo also helps you to understand the credibility of the referring domains pointing to your website, the category of the domains the frequency of backlinks to your website (measured as citation flow), and the trust flow which implies the quality and trustability of the external domain.

Ahrefs:

Ahrefs is one of the tools that helps SEO professionals in several ways especially when they don’t have access to any of the Google tools or cannot understand data of Google tools. Many professionals to simplify their work use Ahrefs tool and you too can explore the tool to find some insights about the domains pointing to your website.

MOZ Backlink Checker:

Moz has an amazing tool with a lot of insights that helps you to check the backlinks pointing to your website, but meanwhile many claims that MOZ data is not reliable or accurate and hence I suggest you all access it before you buy a plan from them, you can give a try to their free plan.

SEMrush

SEMrush is another tool that you can rely on when you find it to be difficult to understand data from webmaster tools. This tool more or like the ahref or Moz backlink checker.

Conclusion:

Webmaster tools when monitored on a daily/weekly basis would suffice your need and the other tools mentioned are mostly useful when you cannot have access to webmaster account or if you have to do a competitor analysis. Many webmasters rely mostly on webmaster tools and and only agencies who do a lot of competitors study, who also need quick solution and also need a means to simplify things to their clients rely on third part tools. My personal opinion/suggestions to all webmaster/seo professionals, none of the tools gives you an accurate data, many tools do a predictions or they have their own way of working which is never equivalent to the data that can be found on GWT’s and just rely on your GWT and stop spending on third party tools especially when you don’t know how to use them or the purpose of having such tools.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.