Why You Should Monitor And Check Backlinks
If you don’t monitor backlinks you have no way of knowing when links are lost or when spammy links are gained. Monitoring your competitors' links also gives you an advantage. Your competitors backlink profile can help with your outreach tactics and gives you a good idea of where quality links are coming from.
How To Get Backlinks?
This is the topic of a completely different blog post. Backlink building is a complex topic and doing the work takes time and patience. But one of the easiest ways to build links to your website is to write guest posts on websites in your niche. You could write for any niche but it's much better to have a backlink from a relevant website.
What You Get With Linkody
# 1 Backlink Checker and Monitoring Service
One of the most useful features of Linkody is the daily notifications that you can set up to monitor your backlinks. Getting an alert about a lost backlink, within 24 hours, allows you to contact website owners immediately. If the changes have been made manually on the linking website then the details are still fresh in the owner's mind. You can then try to discuss getting the link back before a lot of time has passed.
By default, Linkody shows all backlinks from a single domain as one referral. For example, If a website links to an URL on your domain from the footer of their website, you will no doubt have many backlinks from this site. However, Linkody will list just one link. Otherwise, every single page on the site that contains the footer will register as a backlink. Google will not give a whole lot of value to footer or site-wide links so Linkody ignores all links but one, for the sake of clarity.
# 2 Competitor Research
Checking how your competitors are doing might seem like a distraction but it’s a very useful exercise in your link building strategy. If you understand where your competitors’ links are coming from you can attempt to build similar links or suggest a resource on your site as a replacement for a competitor link. The second option is much trickier to do than the first but it’s always worth a try.
# 3 Disavow Rule Generator
If you are familiar with SEO and Google’s best practises (link) then you might ask why the Disavow tool is still necessary? After the last penguin update, Google stated that they will devalue spammy links. So, no need to do it manually, right? Not quite. Google’s devaluing of irrelevant and spam links is based on an algorithm. Algorithms are not perfect. If you find some backlinks that you don’t want then it’s a wise move to disavow them. Google hasn’t changed the recommendations for using the disavow tool and the fact that you are proactively trying to keep your link profile spam free is a good sign.
# 4 SEO Metrics
Want to know the ‘SEO value’ of your website’s backlinks? Linkody pulls industry standard rank metrics from two of the big players in the search marketing world, Moz and Majestic. Alexa is also included. Moz is a search marketing business that created a metric called Mozrank, which ranks websites based on the popularity of their backlinks and internal links. Moz’s Domain Authority is a measure of how well a site will rank on search engines. Basically, the higher the domain authority, the easier it is to get keywords ranked high on Google. Majestic’s trust flow and citation flow are measures of the quality of a website’s backlink profile.
Trust Flow refers to the quality of links and citation flow refers to the number of links. Lots of backlinks with low quality is a sign of a spammy site so to get a good ratio of TF/CF you should focus on quality backlinks. Linkody updates these metrics automatically for each domain in your dashboard. The social shares section shows the number of shares the homepage (root domain URL) has to Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin. The Alexa rank is an indication of a website's popularity. The lower the figure the better. Google has an Alexa rank of 1. Alibaba has a ranking of 185.
Let’s take a look at some of the key features to get a better idea of how it works.
Backlink checker and monitoring service
Building backlinks is still the most important tactic when it comes to off-page SEO. Once you grow your backlink profile, your website naturally grows with it.
And, with eventual growth, it is crucial to keep track of any changes in your backlink profile. A large amount of backlinks simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
In 2019, the quality of your backlinks is more important than the quantity.
This is why we choose Linkody. It lets you set up alerts and daily notifications about recent backlink changes. It also helps you understand the nature of the links you receive, their strength as well as links that suddenly disappear.
Learning about a lost backlink as soon as possible gives you an “unfair” advantage. From experience, you have a greater chance of success when negotiating a removed backlink immediately after it got removed.
The tool’s system performs its 24-hour cycle reporting, so you can be sure that you will get notified within a short time frame and are able to take action immediately.
Keep an eye on your competitors
The ability to spy on your competitors is the number 1 reason why this tool will remain in my toolbox.
Once you recognize and add your competitors to Linkody, you will gain valuable data about the source of your competitors’ backlinks.
An opportunity like that can generate new ideas for your backlink strategy as you can learn from those who did things successfully before you.
We will share with you how we actually use this data proactively. We are stealing our competitors' backlinks.
Yes. That’s correct. There is no shame in admitting that, it's actually quite a great tactic.
If you can provide better value, then why not use it by suggesting a competitors’ link replacement with your URL instead? It is a very simple strategy that has been proven to work.
Disavow Rule Generator
Another feature on Linkody that we found really helpful is the disavow tool.
If you want your website to keep growing and increase in domain authority, you need to stay proactive and keep your backlink profile spam-free.
Linkody will let you identify such “bad backlinks” with ease and allows you to remove them within the tool.
SEO Metrics
SEO metrics show you everything you need to know about your backlink profile.
Unsurprisingly, Linkody provides a great number of metrics that will give you a good idea about your link performance.
By combining industry-standard rank metrics from the two biggest market players - Moz and Majestic, Linkody created a wide technical overview of your links in an easily perceivable way.
By the way - the interface of this tool is another great thing about it.
The clean design of Linkody lets data to be overseen with ease. You will get access to:
- Mozrank, Domain Authority and Spam Score
- Backlinks that currently link to your site
- Social shares on other platforms
- Your domain’s credibility and social flow
- Alexa ranking
- And much more...
Let's see how that looks in real life.
How Much Does Linkody Cost?
The software currently has 5 pricing levels. The basic level, which is suitable for busineses with one website costs $9.90 per month. This allows you to monitor two domains and 500 links. With this plan, you would typically monitor your own domain and the domain of your biggest competitor (or another site that you want to spy on).
The mid-tier plan is the Pro plan. This is suitable for websites with multiple domains, SEO professionals, or small agencies. This plan offers the ability to monitor up to 20 domains with 5000 links. The highest level is the Agency XL plan. This gives you the ability to monitor 100 domains and 50,000 links. 5 different users can also log in so it’s great for teams. You can try out the software for free for 30 days and then decide if you’d like to continue. And they’ve made it easy to sign up – you don’t need to enter your credit card.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for an easy to use, inexpensive backlinks checker and monitoring tool, Linkody is a worthy contender. It's not the most powerful tool out there but it is certainly capable of presenting the most useful information in an understandable form. Note that reports are generated once per day so you won’t receive an immediate alert. You will get an email once the system has performed its 24-hour cycle of reporting. If you're an agency, the white-label PDF reports of backlinks are a neat feature. You can choose the fields to add to the report so as not to overwhelm non-techies or give the full details to more technical clients.
