Monitor Competitor Backlinks with Ahrefs’s Free SEO Tool
See which links will help you achieve top rankings
Ahrefs is a powerful site explorer and backlink-checking tool that offers detailed insight into the link profiles of your website and the websites of your competitors.
The Ahrefs suite of tools are available in several forms, including a limited free trial which allows you to see up to ten backlinks per request and has limited reporting features, as well as premium accounts that offer more results, improved reporting and access to the Ahrefs API – so that you can use other tools to process the data it collects.
Ahrefs tools include:
• The backlink checker
• Site explorer
• SEO reports
• Domain comparison
• Batch analysis so that you can compare multiple sites at once
• Social networking metrics
Ahrefs is incredibly easy to use. You can learn a lot about the SEO health of your website simply by entering your domain name in the Ahrefs backlink checker and viewing the automatically generated reports. However, the true power of the tool comes from the API and the batch analysis features.
Any user of Ahrefs can visit the website and perform general backlink checks on a couple of websites per day. However, some other features are available only to Ahrefs account holders. Signing up for, and logging in to, a free Ahrefs account grants you access to a range of features, including the detailed backlinks reports and SEO reports. Free account holders can generate up to three reports and view 1,000 results per report.
The SEO report provides information about how many pages are indexed, their meta keywords and descriptions, the meta title tags and the content of the page (which also helps when optimising pay per click landing pages), as well as the number of internal and external links on each page.
The backlinks report will list the number of links that each domain has pointing to it from other websites, as well as provide a list of the top referring domains, the most common anchor text and the most commonly linked-to pages. In the post-Panda and Penguin world of Search Engine Optimisation, these reports are incredibly valuable because they can help webmasters and digital marketers to clean up their SEO profiles and make their link profiles look more natural.
If you are stuck for keyword ideas, then you will find that looking at the SEO report for competing websites is a good option. All of the data used by Ahrefs is publicly available, so unlike many other SEO tools, there is no need to “claim your website” to access the reports. Give it a try today!
