To find out which is the best backlink checker tool I decided to setup a test between- • • • • • Downloading your competitors used to be easy when the Yahoo Site Explorer backlinks checker was up and running. It really is a shame they closed it down because is a great way to rank sites in any niche. Since then a few other players have beefed up their offering including, Majestic SEO, (Open Site Explorer), & SEO Spyglass. All of these are web based services except for SEO Spyglass which is a desktop application and part of the package. I will also be testing these against Google Search Console which allows you to download a sample of your backlinks. However this is only useful to people that own the site they are trying to download the backlinks for. If you are trying to discover how your competitors are ranking and want to replicate their link profiles you cannot use Google Search Console to achieve this.

Which Is The Best Backlink Checker Tool? To find out which is the best backlink checker tool I decided to see how many links each service reported for 3 different websites. The 3 sites are my own so I know the history of them very well- • Site 1 – One of my oldest sites with 1000+ pages • Site 2 – A couple of years old with about 300 pages • Site 3 – Just under a year old – still a nurtured baby with ~40 pages This will give us a balanced mix of results and test each backlink checking service from a variety of angles.

Google Search Console reports the total number of links it Google has found for your site under Traffic >Links To Your Site which you can see in the image to the right. I will be using this number as the benchmark for the services to compare against, including the total number of sample links Google allow us to download from that total.

A Quick Look At The Tools Before I get into the nitty gritty of testing I wanted to give you a quick tour of the tools we’ll be looking. Ahrefs.com I will tell you now is a personal favourite of mine.

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They show some fantastic data and break it down in pretty much every way imaginable. How many links you have, from how many IPs, linking to which pages with which anchor text.

They breakdown the links by types and provide all sorts of graphs and visualisation options. The only real drawback with Ahrefs.com is pricing – starting at $79 a month upto $499 a month although the smallest package will suit most. SEO Spyglass Download a of SEO Spyglass This is a unique offering in the fact that it is a desktop application available on its own or as part of. It downloads your backlinks from a number of sources and they even have their own database of links similar to the services above the software accesses directly. It will also fetch live / real time data on the status of links, the page rank, anchor text used and so on. All of which can be exported into highly customisable PDF reports! Unlike the monthly fee based services below this software is available for a one time fee of $99.75 (or $249 as part of ).

Raven Tools also has a completely free fully functional 30 day trial. In a way Raven Tools is like SEOMoz as it provides a suite of tools for managing your online campaigns. However it isn’t quite as developed as the SEOMoz offering and I find it lacking in a lot of places.

The back end design is really poor and a big let down from the impressive front end. You can import your and it will monitor upto 50,000 of them for $99 per month but there are to do this that are a lot cheaper. It is still worth taking out the trial to download some backlinks and have a snoop around though!

Open Site Explorer SEOMoz has a for you to take advantage of. What separates this from the pack is the huge range of tools you get for your money.

Open Site Explorer is just a small part of the SEOMoz offering which also includes rank tracking, weekly crawls alerting you to onsite SEO issues, on page recommendations, social media statistics and competitive backlink analysis to see how you stack up against the competition. It also includes a whole bunch of other tools, webinars, training videos and an expert community. After the 30 day trial it costs $99 per month which is a bargain for what you get! Majestic SEO I really don’t like how present their data it really does leave a lot to be desired. However when you drill down into the data it does provide everything you need to know.

It is very similar to Ahrefs in a lot of ways but in my opinion Ahrefs does a much better job all round – we’ll see what the test results say about that though! Prices start from around $50 (€39 EUR) to $400 (€299.99 EUR) per month. However there is a free account that lets you run more detailed reports for websites you own. Putting Them To The Test The real test though is how many links does each service return for the 3 sites I mentioned earlier? Site 1 – 498,947 Total Links Google reports a total of 498,947 links for this site. Here is the data each tool returned- Backlink Checker # Found% Found Search Console Sample 98,831 19.81% Ahrefs 41,985 8.41% Majestic SEO 30,412 6.10% SEOMoz 31,999 6.41% Raven Tools 27,081 5.43% SEO Spyglass 14,402 2.89% As you can see takes the top spot finding a total of 41,985 links which is 8.41% of the total reported links from Google.

Brings up the rear finding only 14,402 / 2.89% of the total links. Site 2 – 17,390 Total Links Google reports a total of 17,390 links for this site. Here is the data each tool returned- Backlink Checker # Found% Found Search Console Sample 8,802 50.62% Ahrefs 6,535 37.58% Majestic SEO 6,414 36.88% SEOMoz 7,345 42.24% Raven Tools 7,073 40.67% SEO Spyglass 4,619 26.56% This time takes lead finding 42.24% of the total link count with coming just behind with 40.67%.

Still finds itself lagging in the bottom spot though. Site 3 – 434 Total Links Google reports a total of 434 links for this site.

Here is the data each tool returned- Backlink Checker # Found% Found Search Console Sample 283 65.21% Ahrefs 99 22.81% Majestic SEO 85 19.59% SEOMoz 67 15.44% Raven Tools 52 11.98% SEO Spyglass 74 17.05% The final test brings to the top of the pack again finding a toal of 99 / 22.81% of the links. At least SEO Spyglass managed to move its way up from the bottom spot this time though! A Complete Look At The Data First of all lets take a look at the% of links found for each site and service side by side.

Backlink Checker Site 1 Site 2 Site 3 Ahrefs 8.41% 37.58% 22.81% Majestic SEO 6.10% 36.88% 19.59% SEOMoz 6.41% 42.24% 15.44% Raven Tools 5.43% 40.67% 11.98% SEO Spyglass 2.89% 26.56% 17.05% Looking at that you can see that although Ahrefs doesn’t always win, it does edge ahead over the others. But what about if we look at it from a total perspective and compare the total amount of links available to find across the 3 sites with the total amount each service found? Across the 3 sites there are a total of 516,771 backlinks to be found– Backlink Checker # Total Found% Total Found Ahrefs 48,619 9.41% Majestic SEO 36,911 7.14% SEOMoz 39,411 7.63% Raven Tools 34,206 6.62% SEO Spyglass 19,095 3.70% And The Best Backlink Checker Is If you are purely after a backlink checker then is the one to go for clearly. I place a greater value on number of links returned because I personally take all of my competitors links and load them into which provides the most advanced analysis of the links once you have them. However for not much more money per month you can get access to which although returned 9,000 less backlinks then Ahrefs does offer an impressive suite of tools that will support your wider SEO campaigns.

I was surprised to see that didn’t perform better as it does have it’s own links database to pull data from in an effort to make up for the loss of Yahoo Site Explorer which it heavily relied on. IMPORTANT UPDATE: – Viktar Khamianok (Link-Assistant CEO) published to how SEO SpyGlass performed in this test – be sure to check it out! Hats off to him for addressing the issue on the front line in the trenches! The Problem With Them All Every backlink checker suffers from the same problem though and that is that no single one of them can provide a complete overview of your link profile. At best you might find 1/10th of your entire link profile using Ahrefs but what about the other 90% of links pointing to a site? These make a big a difference. The Solution The solution is to grab reports from each service/tool and then combine them into one big master list of links to get the most complete overview of the link profile as possible.

Now obviously it is far to expensive to subscribe to every service but you can take advantage of the, and free trials to get you started and then use the limited free reports from and as well. Major Update – There Is A New Kid On The Block Since I published this post, there is a new kid on the block which means I needed to run a new set of tests. Based on my 1 million domain test of, I decided to repeat that test to include the new kid on the block but with 3 million domains instead. Have launched a free backlink checker tool that is without doubt, the best free backlink checker available! What peaked my interest in it though was when the their integration with it. Although SEO Spyglass is a desktop backlink analyzer tool that provides fresh & accurate data, it performed poorly in terms of the number of links it found.

But with the integration of WebMeUp this announcement really caught my eye- To clarify they are adding 15 billion links & 4 million unique domains while crawling 1 billion links every day. Sounds like a worthy competitor! How To Install Cccam On Az Box Hd Price there. Who Is The King Of Crawling? If you visit the homepages of, or they publish some convenient statistics.

The only one we can compare across the board is the number of links crawled- Ahrefs Ahrefs have crawled a total of 85,799,032,392 links – 85.8 billion. Majestic SEO Majestic SEO have crawled a total of 185,806,146,989 links – 185.8 billion.

WebMeUp WebMeUp have crawled a total of 157,466,548,231 links – 157.4 billion. Are We Going To Crown A New King? Interestingly Ahrefs absolutely dominated the last test above.

But in this update the number of links crawled looks worrying for them! Comparing them it’s clear Majestic SEO are miles ahead and even the new kid on the block WebMeUp have taken stride! • – 185.8 billion • – 157.4 billion • – 85.8 billion The 3 Million Domain Test So with that in mind I wanted to repeat my with each backlink checker tool with the biggest databases. Test Details I put the test together in exactly the same way as I did except with the introduction of WebMeUp to the mix! This is how I created the data- • Downloaded the • Extracted the subnet & IP counts for Majestic • Looked up each domain with Ahrefs & WebMeUp Sounds simple right? Trust me that was much harder than it sounds!

This data along with a PDF is available to download. Making The Comparison You can also make your own comparisons to check your own sites out.

All you need to do is visit each site and enter your domain. If I do that for this blog this is what I find- • – 826 IP’s / 722 Subnets • – 371 IP’s / 329 Subnets • – 1,149 IP’s / 967 Subnets So in this case, Ahrefs finds the most IP’s and the most subnets. Now imagine doing that for 1 million domains. That is exactly what I have done! The Results Last Time Before I get into the new test, lets remind ourselves how Ahrefs & Majestic SEO performed last time. As you can Ahrefs dominated the results last time. Looking at the number of links crawled now though, can Ahrefs 85.8 billion hold off Majestic SEO’s 185.8 billion?

Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO vs WebMeUp Test Results There is a huge amount of data here – it took nearly an hour to complete a single VLOOKUP in excel. So to make it easier to understand I have broken the result down into groups of 100,000 like last time. You can check this out for yourself with the ByGroups.xlsx sheet in the. Wins By IP Address. Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO vs WebMeUp Conclusion Without doubt are still the best backlink checker in terms of database size.

They find more links than both Majestic SEO & WebMeUp put together. But have made some serious improvements in the last few months.

Last time they won 291,250 IP totals & 358,186 subnet totals. This time with a new kid on the block they have pushed those wins to 428,266 IP totals & 439,579 subnet totals. That’s a 22.8% increase in performance since the last test. While Ahrefs have dropped from 709,673 IP wins & 642,737 Subnet wins to 568,526 IPs & 559,330 subnets respectively.

A 16.5% drop in performance! Looks promising as a free backlink checker and could challenge Ahrefs & Majestic SEO in the future as it’s database grows. Previous Performance Chart. How To Verify The Backlinks Checker Data For Yourself If you want to heck the data yourself it is really easy to do!

Just and follow the steps below- • Download the source data • Open the MasterData.xlsx file • Select a line at random • Enter the domain from column A into the search box at, &. • For Ahrefs look at Referring IPs and Referring subnets • For Majestic SEO look at Referring IPs and Referring subnets • For WebMeUp look at IPs and Subnets You can manually spot check these at random! You should also run your own domains through each of the tools to see what results you get for yourself! Creating a lets you run more reports while a let’s you view all the backlink data they have for websites you own. The backlink checker is 100% free to use for anyone!

Signing Off So there we have it, 1 million domains & 3 backlink checker tools compared! Each of these tools have 1 flaw in common though and that is the freshness of the data. It could be that links have been removed or pages deleted since they were last crawled. The only true way to get an is to combine reports from as many services as possible and then use a tool like to fetch real time data.

Which Is The Best Backlink Checker? The best backlink checker is because they have the largest database of backlinks when compared to other backlink checkers. Which Is The Best Free Backlink Checker? The best free backlink checker is because it has the largest database of link when compared with it’s other free competitors but don’t forget you can also use Google Search Console for free as well!

That was an interesting post. I was a little surprised by RavenSEO given that it supposedly gets it’s data from MajesticSEO.

I think a while back it also incorporated open site explorer data but this isn’t on their site any more (from memory so I could be wrong). What do you think about the reporting features of each? For ages I had a MajesticSEO subscription but in the end I got rid of it as I didn’t think the reporting was good enough so couldn’t see the point of a monthly fee. I now just use SEOSpyglass and buy a subscription as and when I need any of the others and cancel them after a month once I have got my data. I actually found that I got more back links from SEOSpyglass than MajecticSEO but that was about 3 months ago since I last did a comparison and things have obviously moved on.

Hey Matt – Great Stuff! I too am disappointed in SpyGlass – Have you had any experience with LinkResearchTool.com?

Ive used their products and they ‘seem’ to work well, and provide a tremendous amount of data, but I have never structured a formal comparison. They offer a free trial for a few days for a tweet here: It would be interesting to put them up against the other major players as well?? They are pretty expensive so it would be good to know if it is actually worth it— I know you’re busy, but just a thought:) Best, Don.

I’m a director here at Majestic. Thanks for the study. It is true that Ahrefs are increasing their index size. However, using resources for “discovery” comes at a cost. The cost is the calculation as to the quality of each link. It’s hard to comment on a study marked Site A, Site B, Site C. The data is public for all the data sets except GWT, so I see no reason why studies can’t use verifiable sites.

You also did not specify whether you used Majestic’s Fresh or Historic Index. As you dig into those data sets you will find some links only one index and some only in the other, however – both indexes are excellent for different types of analysis. Dropping into the analysis, however, is where analysis REALLY needs exploring in 2013. Penguin tells us that it is quality, Not quantity that will count from here on in. Looking at the top 20 links in each list will probably be plenty to come to a conclusion that may not be the one you suggest. Anyway – can you list the three sites you used for the analysis? Hi Dixon, Thanks for jumping over to the post to address it directly =D I think everyone uses these services for different purposes and goals, for example I’m not interested in what Majestic, Ahrefs or anyone else decides is a ‘quality link’ all I want is the raw list of URL’s with no fluff but others like to use the additional data that is available to them.

I certainly wouldn’t look at the top 20 links according to a service to draw a conclusion. I chose to use my own sites for the test because I knew the history of them and I also know the type of links that have being built to them are the exact same types of links my blogs audience will be building. It was also important I had access to GWT to get that bench mark figure. Granted I only tested 3 sites which is a pretty small sample size in the grand scheme of things, but tried to keep things measured in that one was really old/big, one in the middle and one relevantly new/small.

The downside to that though is I wont be revealing them:) It was interesting to see that the largest/oldest site had the least amount of coverage in every single tool. One thing the test didn’t attribute for is data decay.

For example just because Majestic says there are 5,000 links doesn’t mean there are still 5,000 links that are live. Anchor texts could have changed, the page could of lost its PR or anything inbetween the time you update the data and the time I check it. This obviously isn’t unique to majestic but it is a huge drawback of services like this which is why I use to get the view in there here and now, not the last time the service updated it’s data. Either way, the fact that not a single service could even find 10% of the links Google says exists says a lot about how far behind all services of this nature really are. OSE is awesome and all. BUT compared to the tons of services out there, they’re probably the least amount of dedication to that service. SEOmoz is SEOmoz, if they closed OSE tomorrow they wouldn’t loose all too much money and probably cut a ton of AWS costs too.

Their DA and PA system is probably the best I’ve seen compared to Ahrefs domain rank and MJSEO Citation/Trust flow but from what I’ve seen Ahrefs indexes more, Majestic you can sort through data easier and has more tools (their Chrome extension is pretty d*** awesome). Hey Matt, another great stuff from you! Btw, I’d like to ask you something.

When I try to check my backlinks using Majestic SEO, i got couple thousands backlinks. However, when i check my links in Google Webmaster tools, it says that I ‘only’ has 400 or so links.

From the test the amount of backlinks from GWT is greater than the backlink checkers tools, however why in my case it the exact opposite? If it means that my backlinks aren’t indexed by google, then how can i make my backlinks indexed well and show up in Google Webmaster Tools? Thank you for reading this comment, and I’ll really appreciate your answers.:D. Hi Matthew, thank you for coming up with this research, we can see how it can be helpful to your industry peers. You can imagine we’re now having hard times here at Link-Assistant.Com, explaining what has gone wrong with good ol’ SEO SpyGlass.:) We’re constantly running quality tests in house to compare the performance of SEO SpyGlass with that of competitors. What we have noticed over the years, the number of links different tools find varies drastically from site to site. But we’ve never detected such a poor performance, so we’d like to look closer into the possible problems.

Matthew, we’d really appreciate if you disclosed the three domains you’ve been testing – either privately or publicly. We’d like to run the tests in-house to look into the ways we can improve the performance of SEO SpyGlass. Great post, I have personally always used Seomoz.org. I like how it shows the PA of the site at the same time. This will cut your time down on researching which links are quality and which aren’t. I have never used ahrefs, but I like the layout and it still has the lost links.

I can’t tell you how many times someone will come to us and ask “why are my rankings gone, can you help me” I quickly analyze the lost links over the past month with majesticSEO and realize they lost 20k links due to a Google update. This leads me to realize what happened and what I need to do. This also tells me that generally they had some pretty low quality link types used if this happened.

Anyways, I may try the ahref when I am really searching in depth and digging deep to try to top someone to compete against my competitors but will always use Seomoz.org, because I personally like to go by PA. I am ranking for very competitive terms in many countries due to following Seomoz and I feel that there is much more there then just a tool to give an analysis. There is a community of people there that will give you the answers if you just listen and ask. There are enough answers and very smart individuals there that can increase your business by a lot.

I was stuck many years ago on my way of tactics and sure it worked, but when I got over what I thought was the best and started with Seomoz.org. My keywords increased even better and I am now ranking for very good terms like payday loans, cash loans, affordable SEO, cheap SEO, and 100’s of other competitive terms. I give Seomoz.org the credit for this, because their tactics truly do work. Have a great night everyone. SEOMOZ ‘used’ to be the best and but in the last couple of years, these other tools have really come on leaps and bounds.

Yes, SEOMOZ has other tools, but they are basic and not really what you’d use for larger or more difficult SEO projects; it’s all a bit N00b-ish. Ahrefs is great, yes the lack the tools that SEOMOZ does, but they are coming and the interface is more intuitive than Majestic. I’ve not used Majestic for a year or so and I guess they are improving all the time, but it wasn’t ever ‘obvious’ to me and so I cancelled. Yes, I could use it, but it was like writing with my left hand.

The main issue with SEOMOZ is that they take days or even weeks to send reports through, their site crawls are slow and their tools and interfaces lack the granular adjustments required by advanced SEO’s. I know that Amazon AWS has been their Achilles heel; however, users don’t care. They just want their reports and they want them fast. Furthermore, SEOMOZ doesn’t have the Freshest index by weeks and sometimes months. Ahrefs checkes the header files so their freshness is immediate for the most part. Sure they miss stuff when the web-servers don’t report changes, but I’d rather be covered by Ahrefs, than be using data that is 4 – 8 weeks old from SEOMoz. I’ve not used Raven or SEOSpy Glass enough to comment.

However, I have used Cognitive SEO (not reported here) and they have produced some amazing magic off the back of Majestics data. The downside for us here was the speed, we need data and we need it fast, we can’t wait seconds between requests. However, it’s a fantastic tool, if you’re looking after just one or two sites and you don’t mind the lag. SEOMoz is the worst by far in my experience, it’s shallow, expensive and the reporting sucks. I think it’s the worst value suite of tools available on the market at the moment. My website got hacked a couple of years ago and has recently plummeted from page 1 to page 4.

At first I thought it was overuse anchor text, but I’ve now discovered that hackers have posted hundreds of links from other sites to the dodgy files they uploaded onto my site (which were all deleted and fresh installed last year). Which tool would you recommend for putting together a list of all the dodgy links I need to get removed or disavow (e.g. Allow a keyword search on backlink text)?

Or will I need to amalgamate reports from all of them? I’d like to get some insight on the best way forward before I embark on a task that could take weeks, but my business is suffering until I get these links removed. Hi Matthew, another downside to SEO Spyglass is that it needs some serious tweaking and does not work very well out of the box.

Also you can’t use any other software from SEO Powersuite while it’s running. I had to get Yuri, who was extremely helpful and patient, to go through all of the settings.

Things have to split up into groups as otherwise you get blocked, and if it crashes halfway through you are goosed and have to start the painful process all over again. The other programs you analysed take a while to run (SEOmoz inparticular) but you can just forget about them and leave them running. SEO Spylgass does give you results when you want them if it doesn’t crash. Hi Matt I love your website! Just a couple of thingswhy don’t you also compare Link Research Tools by Cemper (expensive though I know)? Also, whilst I’ve always prefered Ahrefs compared with Majestic SEO, I notice that they discontinued their affiliate scheme (still available to existing affiliates) but also stopped their keyword position checker (which I liked a lot).

I understand their reasons for doing this but what type of features do they have instead of these. I don’t mean to replace them directly but just to make the package worth it. So, with this in mind, I’d like to suggest that you perhaps write a comparison of how each tools evolved or changed over timeif you want:). Hey Matthew, thanks for the great article and interesting data and findings. We are just jumping into the deep end of the pool (literally) with our new website effort and your resources and shared knowledge are already becoming very useful for us and much appreciated.

A quick question–responding on a phone at the moment; we’ve not yet dug into your data or the mechanics of the tools Does your own back links data (shown from the three diff tools) represent a count of unique sites containing back links to your site/s, or is the total number of links including multiple back links from any one site (like 5 total back links from )? We weren’t clear on that. Keep up the great work; no doubt a +$10K month is looming large for you!

Arduino Delphi Serial Communications. Thanks again. Steve & Sally Wharton Seattle.

Thanks for this Matthew; having had the unpleasant experience of taking on clients who’ve been hit by manual penalties, I’ve used pretty much every backlink analysis tool on the market and Ahrefs def stands out. That said, the freshness of the data is definitely an issue as you mentioned (especially when you’re trying to monitor link removals). Really looking forward to your next test. As an aside, for some reason your previous and current performance charts aren’t rendering properly for me. Just thought I’d flag that up? Hi, I am a great fan of your blog but I don’t agree with your test.

Entering and checking which site found the most number of backlinks or ip does not make sense. Nothing guarantees that the backlinks are still present.

One service can remove dead lonks more often and hence it will detect a smaller number of backlinks but it will be more accurate! According to me, all the backlinks from the 3 services should be downloaded and using a software like scrapebox free backlink checker to check whether the backlinks detected are still present or not. Great analysis Matthew. Now at least I know how to get as many of my backlinks as possible. Unfortunate that there doesn’t seem to be a way to get a comprehensive list of links to my site.

WMT shows I have 50k links, but the sample they provide is only 10k. Right now one of my sites is suffering from an algorithm penalty so I’m looking to gather as many as possible to try and remove toxic links, but It looks like i’ll be significantly handicapped in identifying all of them which will likely leave many bad links pointing to the site untouched. If the best I can hope for is knowing 20% or so of my total back links seems like it would boil down to plain luck if i bother removing toxic links then wait for the next Google update. Pretty disappointing. My only hope i guess is that Googles sample of my links happens to also include the toxic links and that doesn’t seem very likely.

Great article and extreme detail in the analysis, Matthew. I’ve been reading your stuff each month and glad I stumbled across this one. I’m a Moz member and subscriber to Majestic and Ahrefs as well. But, a new software you should check out is WebMeUp.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one as well since they do provide an indepth backlink profile for any site. Nonetheless, thanks for creating more valuable content we can all read, learn from and share with our clients and team members. I’m reading you for quite a long now But that is my first comment. Maybe you’ll be happy to know that we read you in France too? Anyway, I have 2 questions: 1) I was using SEO Spyclass to check the rankings on the keyword “tee shirt” in Google France. The fact is that a website of a friend of mine appears in first position.

Great for him but I can’t understand why: his website is 12 months old, PR 1 (for the domain), it has fewer links and social signals that the websites that rank 2 to 10 and its content is less optimised. Any idea how that happened? 2) The counter of your $100 online business building has reached 0:00:00 this morning but still I can’t access the content. Just wanted to be sure whether you’re late of I am dumb? Thanks a lot for your articles! Hi, Sorry I reply quite lately but had a lot of work back then (creating two businesses at a time is not easy in such a country as France haha).

Yes a looked at the best backlinks each of the first results has and it appears the website ranked first has not the “best” ones. Other results ranked 2, 5 have.org links and strong links coming from authoritative domains in the “tee shirt” domain. The fact is that my friend’ website is ranked first for the keyword “tee shirt” but is nowhere to be seen for “tee shirt homme” (man shirt). This is unexpected as they sell only man shirts. So I thought maybe they used some keyword stuffing? Anyway, I can’t see it last long in first position as I can’t see any objective sustainable advantage 2. Ok, no problem!

I’m waiting eagerly for it!:) Have a good day! I think this is a good article for the topic of “Which tool finds the most backlinks”, but off the mark for “Which is the best backlink checker tool”.

I like and promote the article, and Matt’s work, but differ on the value of total links by itself. There are many features that the product managers and dev teams of those vendors work on, to make a product that provides strong value for users. The number of links delivered is just one, and not all that big of one for me, when everyone is a few percentage points apart. The ease of use, analysis options, tools for slicing and dicing and leveraging the link data, all are very important in choosing a tool that I may use on a frequent basis. I currently have to support the SEO needs of 2800 websites competing only in local low-competition markets. I do this solo as one of my job functions, so I need a tool that is very usable, has a strong support/user ecosystem, and does more than spit out the most links.

Mat, thank you for an awesome comparison. I have 2 questions.

1) How did you find out the total number of links for each site? What tools did you use to obtain all the links for site #1 that has 498, 947 links? 2) I have about 5,000 links in Google webmaster tools.

I want to check each link to see if it is pointing to my site URL. I could take each link, open it in browser, then view “page source” and search for my site URL to see if that link or page is pointing to my site. The only thing is that checking 5,000+ links manually could take me till next Christmas:). To your knowledge, are any of the mentioned tools above allow you to upload 5,000+ links from Webmaster Tools and check if these links point to my site?

Or perhaps do you know of any tools out there that do that? Yes, Comparison is did good between the tools and I appreciate your efforts to bring such a good post because as SEO perspective I know it’s not an easy task to find out the single – single term. Now many other online tools are available to analysis a website.

But as you had been already wrote about well-known tools so I do not want to go more deeply. My favorite tools are ahrefs.com, Moz/SEO Open Site Explorer and last one is semrush.com. I also read your posts on other topics like link building and on social media. You are much skilled about the industry. Wish you best wishes and looking forward for your next coming post. Regards, Mandeep SEo analyst and manipulator at Enzoo Inc Twitter: @_MandeepSingh_.

Great comparison Matthew! One thing I would like to add in regards to Ravel Tools is the awesomeness of the research central tool. I do understand that building a backlink profile is important but I think we would agree that any good SEO doesn’t rely on competitors backlinks alone. SEO’s who are creating compelling authoritative content (like this piece) mixed in with on-site SEO is important in today’s realm of SEO (along with guest posting w/ influencers in your niche). Research central offers not only backlink profile data but other important data like citation flow, trust flow, domain authority and page authority (if an SEO want the DA and PA for reference) to help make a decision on which backlink to add to the link manager. Then in link manager, the user can make a schedule to obtain those links later in the campaign. Just wanted to add that in regards to raven.

I just wish they would integrate ahrefs API, which I hope comes soon (fingers crossed). Great post and keep up the great work!

Hi matt,,, i want to ask you something. When I checking my backlinks using Majestic SEO tool, i got around thousands backlinks. But, when i check my links in Google Webmaster tools, it only showing me 500 links. From this situation this amount of backlinks from GWT is greater than the backlink checkers tools, however why in my case it the exact opposite? If it means that my backlinks aren’t indexed by google, then how can i make my backlinks indexed well and show up in Google Webmaster Tools? Thank you for reading my comment. Nice post Matt, It’s clear that Majestic “improved” since you raped them with Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO – The 1 Million Domain Showdown In fact what i believe they did is grow their index size to seem tha biggest out there!

But in fact it’s almost useless since it’s slower than ever to recrawl the pages discovered, unlike ahrefs which drops down lost backlinks in no more than 15 days after they get deleted. Stats for my website show: Majestic discovered 348 backlinks they see 339 out of them still live Ahrefs found 388 backlinks, 223 out of them are live. Total backlinks i’m aware of: 451, about 210 are still live.

“Data does not lie.”:D. Good Afternoon, Firstly let me say what an incredibly detailed and well structured article.

I was going to try ahrefs for 2 weeks however I ran into the same issue as a previous user in regards to asking for future payment. I think that my biggest issue between the two would be that for a company of my size we need to monitor our competition but the discrepancy in price between ahrefs and majestic is huge. For a small company we dont have a full time dev team I doubt we would ever need anything more than the SILVER QUARTERLY package offered by Majestic. I suppose my question therefore is that for someone just starting out with back link building and competition analysis do you think the MAJESTIC tool would suffice? Thanks in advance. I was using ahrefs site explorer. In the anchor text ratios it said my keyword had a ratio of 6 percent.

So my website is in 100 domains that ment my keyword was in 6 domains and it was (according to ahrefs). I then took the urls of the 6 domains and searched for them in google and guess what, only two of the six domains were index in google, so the information is incorrect i only had a 2 percent ratio according to google because only 2 domains was indexed, so i thought how can this be. I then went on live chat and was told that beacause links that are indexed in ahrefs does not mean they are indexed in google yahoo bing ect. So then I went on a few different websites and created about 10 backlinks 1 per website and pointed them back to mine, ahrefs again said these backlins were indexed but google did not, so i dont get it help us out here matthew.