Backlink Monitoring: Track backlink status with Monitor Backlinks

Backlink monitoring is necessary if you want to keep an eye on your site’s main backbone – backlinks. It’s common to lose backlinks from time to time but when multiple links are lost or removed within a short period of time, search engines like Google see it as a strong signal that such links may have been acquired unnaturally and may as well go ahead and release their penguins on you.

In this post-penguin era, backlinks have been talked about by so many people especially building backlinks but few have actually bothered writing about maintaining the ones you already have so as not to lose them and avoid getting penalized for such.

The essence of this post is to help you monitor your existing backlinks and take actions before Google releases their pets (Penguins & Panda) on you. Links are changed from time to time, sites lose links all the time but just like I said earlier losing so many links over a short period of time may not be too good as it may mark as a strong signal to acquired links, thus backlink monitoring is an important SEO practice.

Why Monitor Backlinks?

Did you earn a dofollow link in your guest post on another blog? Won’t you like to be notified when your link is removed or changed to nofollow? Guest post, blog commenting etc are among the safest link building strategies in this post-penguin era, or maybe you exchanged links with someone (though links should be naturally earned), backlink monitoring will help you keep tabs with your links and get notified when the other party decides to violate your terms of agreement by removing or changing your link status.

When you build links, Google monitors your link building behaviors and consider your links as natural as a result of your expected behavior, but when several of your links starts missing Google considers this act less natural and this may affect you in a negative way.

Backlink monitoring cannot be easily done manually thus the need to use some automated tools in tracking all your backlink statuses and get alerted when you have lost a backlink. Most of such backlinks monitoring tools are always premium tools but also allow access to limited features on a free plan. So even if you do not have money to buy such plans, you can take advantage of the free plans.

What and what can be monitored?

Using backlink monitoring tools, you can keep track of your anchor text, type of link (nofollow or dofollow), number of backlinks, IP address, PageRank, link removal and even where the links are pointed to (landing page).

You do not have to enter backlinks manually as these tools can search the web for all the links pointing to your site and record them in its database, monitor them all and notify you once there is a change in your links. You can also import links into this tool or manually add the links you want to monitor. Use the SEO Auto Discover feature of Monitor backlinks to import your backlinks from Google Analytics ad get notified when someone links to you.

Backlink Monitoring Tools:

Monitor Backlinks: Monitor Backlinks is the easiest way to track and manage your website’s backlinks, anchor text, IP address, PageRank etc. Simply enter your backlink URLs and let the tool check your backlinks for you. If you are engaged in link building campaign, then you need Monitor Backlinks. Stop tracking your backlink tiers manually, get email notification when someone removes or adds a nofollow attribute to your backlinks.

Advertisers and publishers can also make use of this tool and depending on the number of backlinks you want to monitor you can choose between the different plans. You can see the different plans to choose which plan best suits your need.

Must Read: 5 Easy Professional link building strategies

Other tools that can perform same function include Majestic SEO, LinkAssistant and Linkody. Once you have been notified of a link change, try and find out exactly what caused it by reaching out to the source and ask them to fix it, if you had a deal with such a partner, contact them to correct it so you do not lose the link’s value as this may affect your SEO.