Backlink Monitoring Tool

What Is Backlink Monitoring?

Backlink monitoring is the art of constantly monitoring the health and status of the backlinks to your site. Although getting backlinks is an important aspect of SEO, it is also important to retain them. Backlinks may be lost, modified or lose their SEO value any time and unless you monitor them, these changes may quietly undermine your search engine positions.

This can be done automatically by a comprehensive backlink monitoring tool such as Linkoxy which crawls the pages where your backlinks are posted on a regular basis. It examines the link in the HTML, ensures that the anchor text has not been changed, ensures that the type of link is dofollow or nofollow, and logs the HTTP status of the linking page. This constant check-up will ensure that you are sure that your backlink portfolio is intact and working as desired.

The other option, which is manual checking, is not only time consuming but also unreliable. A small portfolio of backlinks of 50 links would require hours to check manually and by the time you realize something is wrong you might have lost rankings. Automated monitoring is the solution to this as it monitors your links and notifies you when something is changed.

The Backlink Monitoring Process

The monitoring engine of Linkoxy operates by visiting every page on which you place your backlinks on periodically. Our crawler makes a number of checks each time it visits your link to find out what is happening to it:

Checking the presence of links: The crawler reads the entire HTML of the page and searches links that lead to your target URL. This not only catches link removal but also URL changes, redirects and page restructuring which could impact on your backlink.

Anchor text analysis: The anchor text of your backlink is saved each time a page is crawled. This assists you in monitoring anchor text evolution through the years and in ensuring a natural distribution of your backlink portfolio — a key consideration in the penalty of over-optimization.

Link attribute detection: The crawler examines the presence of a dofollow or nofollow attribute on your link. Dofollow to nofollow change can have a great effect on the SEO value of a backlink, and it is important to detect such a change as soon as possible.

Status monitoring of links: Linkoxy also checks the HTTP status of the page linking to the site. When a page has a 404, 503 or other error code, the value of the backlink is effectively wasted even though the link may still be present in the HTML.

The Importance of Backlink Monitoring

Backlink monitoring is of utmost importance. One of the three ranking factors in the Google algorithm is backlinks, and any modification to your backlink profile can produce immediate and dramatic impacts on your visibility in search. This is why it is important to monitor:

Guard your investment in SEO: The creation of backlinks takes a lot of time, effort, and even money. Each backlink is an investment whether you are investing in guest posts, content partnerships, or outreach campaigns. Monitoring will make sure that you receive long-term value out of that investment by notifying you when links are lost so that you can take recovery measures.

Stability in ranking: Lost backlinks tend to cause sudden changes in rankings. Through constant monitoring of your links, you are able to detect and solve the issues before they affect your search positions. This is a proactive strategy that will ensure that you have consistent and stable rankings in the long run.

Enhance link building strategy: Tracking data gives you a good idea about your link building activities. You can observe what kind of links are the most stable, what publishers are the most reliable and what link building techniques can give the most long-term results. This intelligence will enable you to perfect your strategy as time goes by.

Client responsibility: In the case of SEO agencies, monitoring of backlinks is necessary to show the worth of your work to the clients. You can demonstrate to clients what links you have created, their status and what changes have taken place. This openness will create trust and will make your fees worth it. Our link building tracker allows you to manage campaigns and our reporting tools allow you to keep clients informed.

Linkoxy Monitoring Features

Linkoxy offers an all-inclusive set of monitoring tools that are aimed at SEO specialists:

• Status dashboard in real-time — View the status of all backlinks in one place with our easy-to-use dashboard displaying the total links, live links, removed links and expiring links.
• Instant email notification — Be notified immediately when a backlink is deleted, edited or when a link is going to expire according to the time you have set.
• Manual status check — Initiate a manual crawl of all your backlinks whenever you desire the latest information.
• Historical tracking — See when each link was last checked and when it was first detected as live, giving you a complete timeline of link activity.

Creating a Successful Monitoring Workflow

The presence of a backlink monitoring tool is not enough. In order to achieve the best out of your monitoring activity, you must have a defined workflow that converts monitoring data into actionable results. The following is how to create a workflow of effective backlink monitoring using Linkoxy:

Create a good categorization: Have your backlinks sorted by client domain, campaign or priority level at the outset. This organization allows you to prioritize recovery on your most valuable links by triaging alerts. Linkoxy allows you to manage your backlinks in terms of domain and campaigns, or in terms of link building initiative using client management.

Create response protocols: When you get an alert about lost backlinks, you must have a defined way of responding. Develop outreach email templates, allocate members of the team to various categories of link losses, and establish target response times. The sooner you respond to a lost connection the better chances you have to recover.

Check monitoring reports on a regular basis: Although automated alerts will take care of urgent changes, you should also review the overall health of your backlinks on a regular basis. Reviewing weekly or bi-weekly can assist you in identifying trends that would not be detected by individual alerts, such as a gradual decrease in the percentage of live links or a change in the distribution of anchor text.

Linkoxy facilitates this process by providing such features as team assignments, campaign organization, and exportable reports that help to make regular reviews effective and comprehensive.

Tracking Backlinks on Several Domains

Backlink monitoring is an additional complexity to SEO agencies and consultants who have numerous client domains. You have to follow links in numerous sites, each site has its own back links, campaigns and reporting needs. It is practically impossible to scale up manual monitoring to a variety of domains — the number of links to verify increases exponentially with the number of clients.

This is made possible by Linkoxy multi-domain support. Every client domain receives its own structured view on your dashboard, and specific metrics on the number of links, live links, and the percentage of links being healthy. You can alternate between client views immediately and alerts are well marked with the affected domain so that you know which client requires attention.

This multi-domain monitoring feature is accompanied with our reporting features where you can create individual client reports with a few clicks. Post these reports through password-protected links to allow clients to view their backlink information without having to have a Linkoxy account. This monitoring and reporting combination forms an entire client service workflow.

Linkoxy expands with your agency as you expand and have more domains to handle. Our Professional plan allows unlimited tracked backlinks and unlimited team members so that your monitoring capacity does not become a limiting factor to business development.

Best Practices for Backlink Monitoring

In order to maximize the benefits of your backlink monitoring activities, observe the following best practices that have been adopted by successful SEO teams:

Give priority to high value links: Not every backlink is important. The links to high-authority domains, links with exact-match anchor text, and links to your most significant landing pages should be given the greatest attention. When you get several alerts, prioritize your recovery efforts on these high-value links.

Monitor competitor backlink variations: Although Linkoxy is a tool that is used to monitor your backlinks, it is possible to monitor the competitor backlink activity to inform your strategy. When the backlinks of one of your competitors are often deleted by a specific publisher, it may not be a good place to do your outreach.

Document publisher relationships: Store records of your relationships with publishers who link to your site. Removal of a link can make the recovery process much faster when you know the contact information of the publisher and your history with them.

Combine monitoring and your SEO reporting: Add backlink monitoring data to your regular SEO reports. Present such metrics as link acquisition rate, link retention rate, and link recovery rate to show the stakeholders the value of your current monitoring and maintenance.

Frequent Backlink Monitoring Problems and Solutions

Despite the use of a specialized monitoring tool, there are a number of typical challenges that SEO professionals face when working with their backlink portfolios. Being aware of these issues and the ways to overcome them will enable you to derive greater benefits out of your monitoring activities.

False positives due to temporary outages: Sometimes websites become unavailable due to maintenance, server problems, or CDN problems. Even a temporary failure can cause a connection to seem to have been removed when it is merely temporarily unavailable. Linkoxy solves this by verifying links over several crawl cycles before declaring a link as permanently deleted, minimizing false alarms but still issuing timely warnings on actual losses.

JavaScript-generated pages and dynamic content: There are websites that are dynamically loaded with JavaScript frameworks and this may render traditional HTML crawling unreliable. When the site of a publisher is client-side rendered, the link may be present in the DOM but not in the original HTML response. The monitoring engine of Linkoxy can deal with such situations so that it can give correct results even on the current, JavaScript-intensive websites.

Redirected URLs: Publishers occasionally use redirects to change the target of your backlink, but leave it on the page. A 301 redirect could pass link equity to the new URL, whereas a 302 temporary redirect may not. It should be monitored to identify when the destination URL of a backlink is being redirected and to warn you to look into whether the redirect is correct.

Canonical tag modifications: When a publisher places a canonical tag to another URL, the page with your backlink might be down-ranked by search engines. Although the connection is technically present on the page, its SEO might be reduced. These on-page SEO factors that influence the effectiveness of your backlink are comprehensively monitored.

Otherwise, also check out our free backlink tracker, lost backlink checker, and guest post tracker to have more specialized monitoring capabilities.