The best link building and backlink analysis tools make it simple and easy to manage links to your website, and find new linking opportunities.
1. Best overall
2. Best backlink tool
3. Best link building tool
4. Best backlink analysis
5. Best general link tool
6. FAQs
7. How we test
Link building has become a staple of search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns, especially because Google used to be primarily a links-driven search engine powered by PageRank. Although Google and other search engines now take into account other major factors, such as human user experience, brand strength, and semantic processing, link building remains a cornerstone of any good SEO campaign.
It used to be the case that SEOs would try to get links from anywhere, swapping, buying, even hacking, to get them. However, these days the importance of links is less about the volume, and more about high-quality links that will have human-user benefits, such as encouraging people to click for further information or for discounts on a useful product.
This means that link building is now much more focused on generating traffic directly rather than simply trying to game algorithms, which means a need to find targeted users in already existing traffic streams related to your needs. Finding them manually is a challenge, but luckily there are automated tools that can help identify websites and webpages that may be relevant to your own needs, and therefore offer link building opportunities.
Link building remains hard work and easy short cuts are unlikely to deliver significant benefits. But if you can identify useful link sources, you have a chance to put your products/services/brand in front of people you might otherwise find hard to reach, improving your marketing efficiency and ultimately even your ranking positions on search engines.
We've compared these tools across everything from their performance and interface to their accuracy, documentation, pricing plans and more.
Below then are the best link building and backlink analysis tools currently available.
We've also featured the best online marketing services.
The best link building and backlink analysis tools of 2024 in full
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Best overall
SEMrush offers a leading SEO platform, rich in tools, with a dedicated section for link building.
As with similar platforms, there's a section for competitor analysis, allowing you to compare domains, determine their backlink profiles, and produce reports listing potential domains for link building purposes.
However, SEMrush also comes with dedicated tools for improving your link building. This includes the ability to monitor the link building progress of other domains, including new and deleted backlinks. You can also choose to view backlinks for a specific time period, including when specific backlinks were gained or lost.
This all comes on top of the ability to identify linking domains as well as gain some idea of how authoritative a referring domain is. You can filter by backlink type and anchor text. There's also a tool for determining which pages have the most backlinks, including the ability to sort these by domain, subdomain, or URL.
The result is the ability to apply a whole range of detailed metrics to determine the strength of competitor backlinks, as well as being able to identify by source and type in order to identify potential link building targets of your own.
The only negative is new users may feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of SEO tools built into the SEMrush platform.
Overall, SEMrush offers a very powerful platform that allows for a wide range of very detailed backlink analyses to help with building up your own link building profile.
Read our full SEMrush review.
Best backlink tool
Ahrefs offers a comprehensive SEO toolkit which includes a couple of key features to help with link building campaigns.
The Content Explorer tool can provide deeper insights into your own website content as well as reverse engineer competitor websites. You're able to search for a relevant keyword or topic and use the "Highlight unlinked domains" to feature websites that could be useful and valuable sources of links. Prioritizing these websites as link building targets makes finding sources much easier.
Additionally, you can use the same feature running a search of your own brand name, to find which websites are mentioning you but not linking to your website. This allows you to reach out and see if you can arrange to have a useful link inserted - a direct one, a special promotional offer, even an affiliate link as required.
Another key option for link building comes as part of the more aggressive competitive research tool in the Ahrefs Site Explorer. Not only does it allow you to estimate organic and paid traffic to competitor websites, it also allows you to profile its link sources. By looking at these, you should be able to identify more targets for link requests, in order to help build up your own website profile.
As with SEMrush, Ahrefs is such a comprehensive platform that new users may take a while to find their way around.
Overall, Ahrefs is a very powerful links-based SEO platform that allows you to more carefully look at your own website's link profile, including looking for broken links, as well as searching for additional sources to strengthen your link profile.
Ahrefs pricing starts with their Lite plan at around $100 per month, but you'll need the $200 a month Standard plan to get the full link-related functionality of its Site Explorer.
Read our full Ahrefs review.
Best link building tool
Majestic is another major SEO platform that has a rich toolkit, with a number of key features directed toward expanding link building campaigns.
The Site Explorer tool identifies identify major competitors and tracks them, including their backlinks. This will help you discover link opportunities, perform in-depth analyses (topic, quality, language and more) and find the best targets for your own campaign.
The Link Context tool goes further by allowing you to determine what format these links take (editorial, part of a directory, something else?) You can check details such as where the backlink is positioned on a page, such as high up or in the footer, and whether it's placed within a block of text, among images, or one of a list of links.
The result is really deep information mining not just on competitor links but also the sources and types of links they have, allowing you to judge not just their context but also show how you can attempt to copy or imitate part of their link profile, even using the same sources, if the quality makes it worthwhile.
Altogether, Majestic is a very powerful SEO platform and their backlink tools allow for an excellent and deep range of insights on competitor link behavior, which you can then use for your own link building campaigns.
Read our full Majestic review.
Best backlink analysis
Moz Pro offers a suite of SEO tools as part of its platform, including dedicated link analysis tools for both your own and competitor websites.
As with other major platforms, Moz Pro includes a link explorer to run a full backlink check of both your own website and competitor websites. However, it doesn't simply provide metrics on volume but also in terms of domain authority, anchor text, as well as identifying the most valuable pages to help you better shape your SEO and link building campaigns.
There's help in tracking your link building progress, by setting goals and tracking placements, as well as analyzing overall results. You can create multiple results and check when links are set up. Custom drop-down fields make it easier to track these campaigns.
As well as assigned an authority score to domains and pages, Moz Pro also provides a spam score so you can identity and remove poor links, or else simply avoid similar properties. This is a useful feature for determining the potential value of target links and therefore link targets.
In summary, Moz Pro is another perfectly capable SEO platform that offers a useful range of tools, and their link building toolkits are no exception, especially with the ability to monitor when your content is gaining or losing links and with filters by date available.
Read our full Moz Pro review.
Best general link tool
Serpstat offers a simple and easy to use SEO platform with a number of useful tools, including a set specifically for backlink analysis.
Using this tool gives you a general overview of the number of backlinks to a specific domain and/or subdomain. When applied to your own website you can also identify new and lost backlinks, giving you a closer view of your website's link profile. In-depth reports include details such as whether the links are follow or nofollow, as well as how many other outgoing links there are to other pages or domains in proximity, as well as the language.
As with other tools, you can also track competitor backlinks to see not just sources they are getting links from, but also the most recent links. Additionally, there is a scoring system to help judge the value of source domains.
Other tools dig more deeply into your own website's link profile, identifying the most popular pages and how many pages and domains link to them, similar to the information found in the Google Search Console.
While Serpstat isn't as comprehensive as some of the other link building analysis platforms featured here, it does present a good overview which should suit most people. Probably benefiting small businesses rather than SEO agencies, it's an accessible and price-competitive tool worth considering.
Read our full Serpstat review.
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Link building and backlink analysis tool FAQs
What is a link building and backlink analysis tool?
A link building tool is a service that helps a website acquire or generate links to enhance its search engine optimization (SEO).
These tools help to find potential websites to get links from and assess their quality based on SEO metrics like domain authority.
A backlink analysis tool is a service to assess the quality and quantity of links that guide readers back to your site from other websites.
How to choose the best link building and backlink analysis tools
When selecting the best link building and backlink analysis tools for you, begin with considering what aspect of link building you need to focus on. While some tools are excellent at link management, others are solid at backlink analysis and at link building.
You'll want to consider how simple the interface is and how steep the learning curve of the tool is. Beginners will do well with tools that are easy to learn, while experienced digital marketers or bloggers will fare well with more complex tools.
Make sure to evaluate the quality of the backlink analysis and the overall accuracy of the tool, and check reviews from other users to find out what their experience with the tool was.
Lastly, check if the tool fits your budget, offers sufficient documentation, and has solid customer support.
How we tested the best link building and backlink analysis tools
To test the best link building and backlink analysis tools, we looked at their features and determined what aspect of link building and analysis the tools were performing well at. We segregated and presented these tools based on their strengths, like backlink analysis, link management, and link building.
We assessed their overall performance, interface, and learning curve to identify what level of users these tools would be best suited for. We evaluated their accuracy and quality of analysis and considered their customer support and documentation.
Read more on how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar.
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