Free Backlink Checker from Seobility

Various factors influence the quality of backlinks, including:

• Link attributes such as “nofollow”: The nofollow attribute tells search engine crawlers not to follow these links. As a consequence, no link juice is passed on to the linked web pages. This link type is generally less effective in improving your site’s rankings, but is still an important part of an organic backlink profile.
• Anchor text: A link’s anchor text (also known as link text) provides search engines with information about the content of the linked page. Although you should aim for a healthy mix of different types of link text, a certain amount of link texts containing your target keyword is recommended.
• Domain Rating: Links from high-authority domains are usually more beneficial for improving your website’s rankings.
• Relevance: Links between sites that cover similar topics, or that operate in the same niche, are considered more natural by Google than links between totally unrelated websites. If the text surrounding a link is relevant to the topic of the linked page, this can also have a positive impact on your rankings.

Backlinks can generally be seen as a recommendation for the linked web page. Since the early days of search engines, they have been an important ranking factor that Google and other search engines use to rank their search results. Although they became less important over time, building high-quality backlinks from other websites is still an important part of off-page SEO. Especially in very competitive industries, where backlinks can give you the deciding ranking boost.

Additionally, backlinks have regained attention with the rise of AI-powered search engines and tools, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. Having your website linked and mentioned on other sites about a particular topic will help associate your brand or content with that topic, thereby increasing your chances of being mentioned or cited in answers of AI tools.

Besides analyzing your competitors’ links, there are several other ways to build high-quality backlinks to your website:

• Create high-quality content that attracts backlinks because it’s helpful or interesting (e.g. tools, infographics, statistics, etc.)
• Publish guest posts on top sites within your niche.
• Ask your business partners and other relevant contacts for a link.
• Submit your website to relevant business directories.
• Broken link building: Find broken backlinks of your competitors, reach out to the referring websites, and ask them to link to your content instead. (Tip: Seobility’s Backlink Monitoring feature lets you find your competitors’ broken backlinks with just a few clicks.)

The following link-building tactics should be avoided:

• Buying links: This is against Google’s guidelines for webmasters and can result in a website penalty.
• Link spam within free directories: Don’t submit your website to each free directory that you can find. This has been a popular spam technique in the past, which is why Google mostly ignores this type of links. You should rather focus on relevant business directories that are actually visited by potential customers.
• Links from off-topic sites: If you have many backlinks from off-topic sites, this may seem suspicious to search engines and could be interpreted as attempted manipulation. This is also the case if you have a high proportion of exact-match link texts, if the number of links is growing very rapidly over a short period of time, or if there’s a high proportion of low-quality links.

You can find more link-building tips in our guide on how to build high-quality backlinks.

The Seobility Backlink Checker lets you analyze both your own backlinks and those of your competitors. In this way, you can identify new link-building opportunities with ease. Just enter your competitor’s domain to get a quick overview of all websites that link to your competitor’s site. The results can give you an indication of your competitor’s link-building strategies, and you also get a list of websites you can contact yourself.