Best Methods and Tools for Monitoring your Website's Backlinks

[JasonKhoo]

Recently, I've launched two websites. I want to make sure I'm doing a good job monitoring our link building efforts. I'm see a lot of tools out there to supplement my use of Open Site Explorer. What I want to know is what tools I should be using to monitor my links? My ultimate goal would be to have the data to track the number of links I'm adding a month so that I can use it for reporting.

There is another layer. Because the sites are new, OSE is actually not reporting any links found. I can only find reported links through Google Search Console. Any advice? Is this something where I will just have to wait for everything to get indexed?

[Mark.]

Personally I use semrush.com to quickly monitor the backlinks to a website. It will give you a nice overview of all the referring ip’s and url’s and you can export it into Excel. However there is no option to see the changes over time (at least not in the free version). In Moz under “Links > Competitive metrics” on the History tab you can see graphs that compare some link data with your competitors over time. To get more information for a rapport I export the data from semrush once a week. This way I can show all the link metrics over time with the top referring domains for a website compared to the competitors. And yes it can take some time before the link metrics are indexed.

[Alick300]

Hi Jason,

My personal preference is Ahrefs. Now I do gather data from other sources, but I find ahrefs gives you the highest number of active links.

Thanks

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Another vote for Ahrefs.

I personally wouldn't use SEMrush for stuff like this as their backlink data isn't going to be as comprehensive. There is always Majestic as well, but I find that a bit clunky now.

Try the free trial with Ahrefs - you wont be disappointed

-Andy

[Mustansar]

Hi

I would go for Ahrefs and Majsitc site Explorer along with Google Webmaster.

In my opinion, use of these would give you a snopysis of new and exsiting backlinks for your site. You can also try MOZ site explorer tool. However, this is relatively new and has less data than the other two.

[JasonKhoo]

Thanks everyone! I'll check all those resources out.

Are there a lot of overlaps with SEM Rush, Ahrefs and Moz?

[Mark.]

Hi

Ahrefs is definitely a better option than SEMrsuh for this, because it has a more accurate link database. SEMRush and Moz both have less link data, so Ahrefs would give you the most complete picture. I suggested SEMrush because it is free tool (sort of, 10 free requests per day + 10 with an account).