From expert tools capable of gathering huge amounts of data, to easy-to-use tools for novice SEOs, there’s a huge range of link profile tools out there. To find the right tool for you, in today’s post we will share some of our personal favourites.
1. Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer can provide a huge amount of raw data about your site and the sites of your competitors. Primarily used by SEO agencies, the tool provides useful analytics for those in the industry. There’s a free version (with daily search limit) if you want to try it out but for the full version you need to subscribe to the Moz Pro package.
Why use it?
- Compare your backlinks with your competitor’s
- Gain an incredible understanding of your link profile
- Ability to check domain authority, subdomain authority and broad metrics
2. Majestic
Majestic includes more data from a deeper web crawl than Open Site Explorer, arguably providing a better tool for managing your link profile. This tool is most suitable for professional SEO agencies, but is also used by media analysts, entrepreneurs and developers.
Why use it?
- Capable of crawling and indexing large amounts of web data
- ‘Fresh’ and ‘Historic’ indexes updated daily
- Backlink history checker which allows you to compare up to five domains at a time
3. Ahrefs
Less well-known than its competitors, Ahrefs is a sophisticated tool for analysing your link profile. Ideal for SEO agencies, Ahrefs offers five levels of access, starting with a basic free version and offering more data at each level.
Why use it?
- Toolset includes site explorer, batch analysis, crawl report, backlinks report and domain comparison
- User-friendly overview screens, accessible raw data and detailed reports
- CSV export for site explorer, reports and batch analysis
4. Cognitive SEO
Cognitive SEO is a tool that aims to provide all of the data and analysis necessary for link-building campaigns. The tool is ideal for SEO professionals looking to save time and enhance performance.
Why use it?
- Link preview tool which pinpoints the exact position of a link on site
- Link classification, which allows you to spy on your competitor’s link-building strategies
- Link management to monitor your top incoming links on a daily basis
- Tracks your daily ranking on Google, Bing and Yahoo and can compare this to your competitors
- SEO project management tool to monitor your progress and allocate role-based permissions to multiple users
5. Link Research Tools
Link Research Tools is a comprehensive link-building application, which uncovers new link-building opportunities and checks out what the competition is doing. Link Research Tools is ideal for SEO professionals who want a comprehensive tool. It’s also useful for SEO novices, as it provides a useful metrics guide.
Why use it?
- Offers 93 SEO metrics
- Finds risky and suspicious links, locates dead links and identifies the strongest pages of a domain
- Can help speed up a site’s recovery following a Google penalty
- Competitive research – including keywords analysis and the ability to compare your link-building campaign with your top competitors
- Weekly email alerts about new backlinks
- Discover link-building opportunities and a website owner’s contact details
6. Who Links To Me
Who Links To Me is a tool which makes backlink analysis, link-building and reputation monitoring quick and easy. From a free subscription to bronze and silver versions, there are different packages to suit a wide variety of SEO agencies.
Why use it?
- Site overview provides a summary of the top information from all reports
- Domain report featuring a detailed list of all sites linking to you and your competitors
- Quickly find valuable and viable link targets
- Anchor URL report shows you which pages are being linked to
- Analyses which countries and top-level domain links come from
- Exports entire reports to CSV
7. Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a fantastic free app that checks your site for broken links. The tool is useful for any business looking to ensure the basic link structure of their site is operational.
Why use it?
- Deep crawling capability
- Runs on most Windows versions but no Mac version is available
- Clear, no-frills user-interface
- Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
- Simple report format, which can be emailed
- Supports SSL websites (“https:// “) and partial testing of ftp and gopher sites