How do you check your backlinks nowadays?

by ilee
10 replies
  • SEO
  • |
Ok, sounds like a rookie question but hear me out...

So I haven't been in the internet marketing loop for over a year now (and not obsessively for much longer than that). Now getting back into it, and everything's going swimmingly except one thing.

Before my break from IM, PR was still a relatively good factor when determining how good the backlink profile of a backlink was, but obviously that hasn't been updated in ages (and not sure it will). I've never really trusted the ratings that backlink checkers like ahrefs and moz give, but maybe it's time to start testing these out again.

Now I'm out of anything that I can check quickly to give an estimate of how good the backlinks are. Obviously this is not ideal when researching 100s of domains. And I'm not prepared to start manually checking individual backlink strengths.

The question is... what do you use to gauge how powerful the backlinks? I never realised how much I based the strength of backlink backlinks on google page rank until now.

TL : DR... been out of the SEO loop for a while. Really miss frequently updated google PR. What do you use instead to quickly/roughly determine strength of backlinks
#backlinks #check #nowadays
  • Profile picture of the author Patho
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  • Profile picture of the author cottonmouth
    SEOQuake plugin had always been my favorite, but I had been experiencing trouble with my latest Google Chrome update, it wouldn't work, so I stopped using it.
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  • Profile picture of the author SocialDemon
    The best option is SEO Spyglass. Even the free version of SEOSpyglass is awesome.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
    I use all the three major link research tools, ahrefs.com, majesticseo.com, and opensiteexplorer.com and then compare their authority values to get an idea of how strong a backlink is. Pagerank is useless these days.
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  • Profile picture of the author ilee
    Cheers for the replies!

    Finding the backlinks is fine. It's the luxury of being able to scroll through quickly and check the page rank of backlinks that I miss.

    I guess I'll need to look further into how the big 3 backlink checker metrics are calculated to see which ones best. What a lot of them miss I feel, is when a link is spammed to death yet, each spam link still adds value to the metric whereas in real life, these links will demote the backlink.
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  • Profile picture of the author SteveDino1
    SEOQuake should help you with that
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  • Profile picture of the author ilee
    Next time someone posts Majesticseo openlinkprofiler ahrefs... I'm going to punch someone in the face. I was talking about the metrics people used.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by ichl13 View Post

      Next time someone posts Majesticseo openlinkprofiler ahrefs... I'm going to punch someone in the face. I was talking about the metrics people used.
      Most people do not read threads before posting. They read the title and just post to get their precious little post count up.

      I'm going to clean this thread up right now.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jayski32
    Here is a brief excerpt from my website FAQ. I think this is what you are asking for?
    1. Domain Authority: Also known as “DA”. The DA is included as people seem to really like that metric although my personal opinion is that its very poor. It is a metric provided by the guys over at MOZ. The reason I think the metric is poor is based mostly on experience. I buy a lot of domains, and I use a lot of domains (as I write this I have over 600 “money sites”). In all that time, I have never found any correlation between DA (or PA for that matter) and how the domain actually performed. I do know that the metric rewards spammy links. Which is the exact opposite of what you want.
    2. Trust Flow and Citation FLow: Also known as “TF” and “CF”. These metrics are provided by majesticseo. TF is the best metric available from third party providers in my opinion. I did a case study a while back when TF/CF first came out (for a never released video series on domain buying) and found a strong correlation between Trust Flow and domain performance. I like to think of Trust Flow and its corresponding metric Citation Flow through an analogy as a system of plumbing pipes. The Citation Flow is equivalent to the water pressure, the Trust Flow is like the pipe size, and the “water” in this analogy would be the “trust” flowing from the links pointing to the webpage. So a site with high trust flow would be like having big fat pipes for trust to travel through. Citation Flow would be how quickly that trust is hitting the page. The size of the pipes usually depends on the type of link it is. Homepage links, in content links, site-wide links, all make the pipe bigger. The number of links and there sources help determine how fast that trust is flowing to the site. Taking this analogy further, if a site has a big pipe but not a lot of pressure its probably because the site only has a few links perhaps from a homepage so the site might not be as strong as first blush. Conversely if a site has small pipe heading to it but a lot of pressure coming through it , the site most likely has a spammy profile. What you are looking for is a site with a decently wide pipe and a correspondingly decent amount of pressure. I hope this analogy helps.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ferzy
    Most people use either the combo Domain Authority and Page Authority from moz - Open Site explorer, or the combo Citation Flow - Trust Flow from majestic seo. For a more comprehensive backlink profile, ahrefs is the link checker of choice.

    I use a combination of all of them, because each of them individually are flawed, but when you combine them you reduce the risk of bad data.
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  • Profile picture of the author jameyson72
    I use SEO PowerSuite. It's downloadable and free. You can analyze your website's SEO, do competitor research and also discover every single backlink to your website. They also have a premium version, which gives you more features, but I just use the free version...
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