How to Track Backlinks: A Comprehensive Guide

Intro

Backlinks, an essential part of any SEO strategy, are links from other websites that direct users to your content. An indicator of trustworthiness and credibility, they significantly influence your website's search engine ranking.

Tracking them allows you to understand who is mentioning your site, which can provide valuable insights into your online performance and areas for improvement.

In this article, we will delve into effective methods to track backlinks, offering a comprehensive guide to optimize your SEO efforts.

The Importance of Tracking SEO Results

When you acquire high-authority backlinks, it’s essential to measure how they impact your website's performance. Tracking them not only allows you to monitor the success of your link-building efforts but also to discover which aspects of SEO are working and identify any areas that need improvement.

This insight will help you understand what works and what doesn’t work, allowing you to refine your strategy.

For example, you may want to concentrate on building assets. Think of in-depth content that is going to help users solve their problems and then, more likely to generate backlinks and boost your organic search results.

Or, you may want to focus on a guest post campaign, targeting related websites in your niche and allowing you to reach a new audience. This strategy also allows you to adjust the anchor text of your links, change the target page, or select a different placement for better performance. The team from Osborne Digital Marketing created a free backlink monitor with Google Sheets. All you need to do is enter your backlink into the sheet and run the script.

What You Need to Track

Understanding the importance of tracking backlinks is only half the battle; knowing what precisely to track is equally as important.

Here are some aspects you should check:

Backlinks

Monitoring backlinks allows you to understand which websites are linking to yours and the quality of those links.

Regularly tracking them will help you identify if any suspicious or spammy links have been added, as well as highlight any new and valuable opportunities for outreaching and building connections.

Specifically, here's what you need to analyze:

• When you earned the link
• The referring domain
• The target URL
• Whether it's a dofollow or nofollow link
• And most important, if the link is indexed

When You Earned the Link

Time-tracking is an essential part of link-building. It gives you insight into how long it takes for particular websites to give you a backlink, giving you a more accurate idea of when to expect results from your efforts.

The Referring Domain and Target URL

You should check the referring domain to make sure it's relevant to your website and that the content is of high quality.

You should also pay attention to the target URL, making sure it's the right page you're trying to rank for your desired keyword.

Dofollow and Nofollow Links

Dofollow links pass value to the target page, whereas nofollow links do not.

It's best practice to acquire more dofollow than nofollow links, as this signals to search engines that your website is trustworthy and authoritative.

Is the Link Indexed?

You should also verify if the link you earned is indexed. If not, it's unlikely to pass any value at all; thus, it’s important to make sure your backlinks are indexed and rank in SERPs accordingly.

Anchor Texts

Anchor texts provide more information about a page's content. Tracking them can reveal which keywords are associated with your website and their relative importance.

Understanding these anchor texts is also useful when diagnosing any issues or errors in your SEO campaigns, as well as gaining valuable insights into what content resonates with your target audience.

You want your anchors to be natural and descriptive of your website’s content. In other words, a mix of exact and partial matches, branded, related keywords, or naked links.

Rankings

Your website's ranking is an important metric to track over time; it indicates how successful your SEO strategy has been and will help you identify areas for improvement.

By monitoring your rankings, you can easily spot any changes or potential issues that need to be addressed promptly.

The frequency of your ranking checks will depend on the level of competition for a particular keyword.

How To Track Backlinks

Once you know what to track, the next step is to find out how to do it. Here are three methods you can use.

Use a Backlink Monitoring Tool

Using a tool such as the Ranktracker backlink monitor is one of the most effective ways to track backlinks.

It allows you to monitor various metrics, such as the referring domain, target URL, anchor text used, and whether it’s a dofollow or nofollow link.

It can also detect any new links that have been acquired over time as well as any suspicious or spammy links that have been added.

Other than this feature, Ranktracker offers a variety of other tools such as the backlink checker, keyword finder, web audit, and more.

Leverage Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an invaluable free tool that provides valuable insights into your website's performance.

You can access detailed reports on your backlinks, allowing you to identify new ones and understand how they are impacting your website's SEO efforts.

You just need to visit the "Links" section of the GCS menu, and you will see a report with:

• Top linking pages
• Top linking sites
• Top linking text

Top Linking Pages

This report gives you an overview of the pages that link to your website, so you can easily identify any new links.

If you click on each of your URLs, you will get a much more detailed overview of all the backlinks pointing to that page, as well as an analysis of the anchor text used on each link.

Top Linking Sites

This report provides insights into which sites are linking to your website.

If you click on each site, you'll get a detailed overview of the links that they are providing, which can help you identify new outreach opportunities.

Top Linking Text

This report will show you which anchor texts have been used when linking back to your site.

It is an excellent way to identify any unnatural or irrelevant keywords that have been associated with your website, allowing you to modify your SEO strategy.

Check WordPress Trackbacks

Doing SEO with WordPress is easier than with other CMS.

In fact, if you manage a WordPress website, trackbacks are an easy way for tracking backlinks.

They allow other websites to notify your site when they link to one of your posts or pages.

In WordPress, when you link to another website in a post, you can send a trackback. This includes an excerpt of your post and a link to the post where you linked to their content. The receiving website may decide to display this trackback as a comment.

By enabling this feature in your settings menu, you will be able to quickly and easily identify new links and track how your content is being shared.

Conclusion

Tracking backlinks is an important part of any successful SEO strategy.

Regularly monitoring your backlinks will help you identify new opportunities, evaluate the effectiveness of your link-building campaigns, and understand which aspects of SEO are working best for your website.

Using a combination of tools such as Ranktracker, Google Search Console and WordPress trackbacks will ensure you have all the information needed to optimize your SEO campaigns and maximize their success.