In enterprise and professional SEO, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on your backlink profile. Regardless of anything you may have read, backlinks remain the single largest search engine ranking factor. In a later post I’ll be covering why you should be monitoring your backlinks in the first place.

While this is a small list, I should note that I don’t recommend one over the other, rather I recommend all of them together as they work best in conjunction with each other in addition to the Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) external links report.

#1 – Ahrefs Backlink Checker

Ahrefs brings in the number 1 spot for consistently providing the best and most up to date results.

Some of My Favorite Features:

• New/Lost Backlinks Graph
• ccTLD Distribution Map
• Anchor Phrases for Referring Domains & Pages
• Broken Backlinks Tool
• 01 Backlink/Domain Filter
• Top Pages by Referring Domains

My only complaint is the issue with the “First Seen” date. If you’ve had a client for a year and the CMO checks Ahrefs and sees a “new” spammy backlink that was first seen in the last few months, naturally they’re going to have a few questions. The interesting thing with this issue is that I’ve seen the date listed change as months go by, so it always looks fresh.

#2 – SEMrush Website Backlink Checker Tool

The first seen feature in SEMrush works a lot better than Ahrefs, it seems to pull dates from the site itself (e.g. the link is in a blog post and the date is visible). This system, while not always accurate, seems to work much better than a date based upon the tool’s crawler.

Some of My Favorite Features:

• Referring Domains By Country
• First Seen Date
• Backlinks by Indexed Pages

#3 – Majestic SEO Backlink Checker

For the most part I don’t use Majestic on a day to day basis anymore, however it has a few fantastic options that make me unable to stop using it.

Some of My Favorite Features:

• Free for Sites Verified in WMT
• Topical TrustFlow & CitationFlow
• Finds Links Missed by the Other Tools