You’ve had a long week grinding away at SEO work.

Now you want to know if your hard work has accomplished anything.

How do you find out?

By checking your backlinks. 

And you can do that before your morning coffee cools off with Monitor Backlinks.

Check My Backlinks in 20 Minutes or Less with Monitor Backlinks

The first time you use Monitor Backlinks to check your backlinks will take about 20 minutes.

After the initial setup is done, checking your backlinks is just a mouse click away and takes only a few minutes.

Here’s how to get that valuable backlink data.

#1. Choose Your Domain and Add It to Monitor Backlinks

Some people mock “The Joy of Cooking” for including directions that might seem obvious, like “Stand facing the stove.”

But in my books, it’s always best to make everything clear.

Your first step is simple: Choose just one domain to check, and add it to Monitor Backlinks.

If you don’t have a Monitor Backlinks account, you can get a free trial here to follow along. No credit card required!

Log in and click on “Manage Domains” from the top-right drop-down menu.

 

 

You’ll see a page like the one below. In this example, there are already two domains added to Monitor Backlinks.

 

 

Click the “+” button in the top right and follow the prompts to add a new domain.

If you have more than one website you want to check the backlinks of, like in the example above, just repeat the steps to add another domain.

#2. Check Your Backlinks

When you first add your domain, you may need to wait a few minutes for the backlink data to appear. After the initial setup, your backlink profile will continue to be updated regularly for you to check in real time.

To get the information you’ve been waiting for, just click on the “Your Links” tab from the main menu on the left.

 

 

This will take you to your list of backlinks.

 

 

You get a wealth of information about each backlink, including the date it was crawled by Monitor Backlinks, the page it links from and the page it links to, the anchor text used and much more.

That’s your backlinks checked!

You can also get a quick summary of your backlink situation by going to the main “Overview” page.

 

 

Here you’ll see a summary across the top of the page.

 

 

This summary view tells you a few key things about your backlinks at a glance. Most importantly:

• How many backlinks you have.

 

 

This has two parts:

The first number is the total number of backlinks shown by Monitor Backlinks, which includes only one backlink per unique domain. So if you have 10 backlinks from one domain, this will still show as one backlink.

The second number is the total number of discovered backlinks. That includes multiple backlinks from the same domain.

• How many domains are linking to you.

 

 

This metric tells you the number of unique domains with backlinks pointing at your website.

Like with your backlinks above, it tells you the number of unique domains added and showing in Monitor Backlinks compared to the total number of discovered domains.

Now that you know how to check your backlinks, what’s next?

I recommend digging a little deeper.

#3. Check Your Backlinks for SEO Value

Say you gained over 100 new backlinks last week. What would you do?

Sure, you might dance and celebrate—at first. But once the euphoria wears off, you need to take a closer look.

(This step is especially important if you’ve outsourced your link building to an outside specialist or agency.)

In essence, you need to find out if you’re attracting good, bad or ugly backlinks.

If you attract too many junk level backlinks, your SEO results and traffic will start to slow. Even worse, low-quality backlinks are unlikely to send high-quality prospects to your website.

Now for the good news:

It’s incredibly easy to evaluate the quality of your backlinks with Monitor Backlinks.

Go back to the “Your Links” page for your chosen domain and pay attention to the following metrics for each one:

 

 

• Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Created by Majestic, these metrics give you an idea of how trustworthy and influential the linking website is. The higher the number, the better.

• Spam Score. This metric comes from Moz and scores the likelihood of the linking website being spammy. It ranges from 0-17 based on how many spam flags the website has triggered. You want to see lower numbers here.

• MozRank. Also created by Moz, MozRank tells you how popular the linking website is based on how many backlinks it has. MozRank scores from 0-10 and the higher the score, the more popular the website is.

• Domain Authority. Also known as DA, Domain Authority is a 0-100 scale that summarizes the authoritativeness of the linking domain. Aim for more backlinks from high-DA sites.

Another great way to check your backlinks for quality and SEO value is to use Monitor Backlinks’ in-built filters.

Click on any of the numbers across the top of the page to filter for:

 

 

• Links that Google considers. These are the followed backlinks that provide “SEO juice” to your SEO results. I recommend aiming to have over 50% of your backlinks in this category.

• Links that Google ignores. These nofollowed backlinks are less helpful to your SEO goals. However, they shouldn’t be written off entirely. If you get a backlink like this from a high-profile website, you can still get a good amount of traffic from it even if you don’t get SEO credit for the backlink.

• Links with warnings. As shown in the screenshot below, clicking this button runs a custom search in Monitor Backlinks. You’ll see a filtered list of potentially spammy backlinks that have triggered warnings such as high Spam Score or unnatural anchor text.

 

 

You can’t prevent these backlinks entirely. However, you can adjust your backlink building strategy to avoid outreach to websites like these, so as not to add more to your backlink profile.

• Links without warnings. These backlinks are better because they’re not setting off any red flags. As you review these backlinks, look for patterns to learn what’s working and what’s not.

For example, what pages are earning the most backlinks on your site? These are the pages you should promote more heavily because they’ve already had a great response.

Help, I Have No Backlinks!

If you see no backlinks at all, run through this mini checklist to find out what could be happening:

• When did you add your domain to Monitor Backlinks? If it’s only been a few minutes since you added your domain, the data most likely isn’t available yet. If you have a large site with a lot of backlinks, it might take a little longer to gather the data the first time round.

• How old is your website? If you have a new domain that was created less than a month ago, you can’t expect to have many (if any) backlinks yet.

• Is your robots.txt file working? While unlikely, you might have a problem with your robots.txt file—you might accidentally be telling Google to ignore your website. Check out this guide to learn more about robots.txt and how to use it correctly.

• Are you proactively working to attract backlinks? The links won’t just come to you—you need to have a link building strategy in place. Typically, that involves two components: Creating content worthy of backlinks, and promoting that content via outreach to let people know about it.

If you’re still not seeing any backlinks, follow this guide to change that.

Now You Know How to Check Your Backlinks

Whenever you think “check my backlinks,” just think Monitor Backlinks.

For best results, make backlink monitoring part of your regular routine so you can detect progress and problems quickly. This is one of the ways to mark yourself as a true SEO professional.

Sign up for a free trial here to get started right away!

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Bruce Harpham helps business to business software companies attract more leads through content marketing. Find out how leading companies like ClickFunnels and Close are growing by visiting his website.