SEO Link Tracker: the Shortcut to Streamlined Link Building

Quality backlink research is often painstaking and consumes much time. And monitoring backlinks is key to sustaining a long-term link-building strategy. If you have ever wanted a batch backlink analysis tool for that, we released it!

Meet Link Tracker — it will keep an eye on the uploaded list of backlinks, saving you time by checking their status in bulk. Since it's an alpha version of the tool, you may not be able to solve some tasks in it just yet as we're still developing it.

The Link Tracker tool allows you to create multiple projects that contain one target link and up to 10,000 source links. A project displays information about the link indexability, any issues with a link, and the date of the last update. It provides the freshest data on links by the listed URLs whenever you need it. 

Let's explore how this tool can make your link-building efforts easier in this guide.

The Importance of Backlinks For SEO

In case you didn’t research backlinks before or not sure whether your business needs it, read the article below, because, we promise, this is one of the essential tasks for promoting business online and offline.

Serpstat Backlink Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide

Building a website’s backlink profile means building its authority. Authoritative websites rank higher and are more trusted by users and search engines.

Serpstat evaluates a website’s authority by the “Serpstat Domain Rank” metric from 0 to 100. The SDR depends on the quantity and quality of the referring domains.

The benefits of tracking backlinks:

• Boost SDR with only high-quality, relevant backlinks.
• Fix broken backlinks.
• Avoid spammy backlinks.
• Highlight issues of an SEO strategy and refine it.
• Find top-performing content.
• Enhance online reputation by ensuring data accuracy.
• Control the growth dynamics of the backlink profile.

When to Use the Link Tracker?

Let's say you have a list of URLs from which you expect to get backlinks and/or you want to monitor their status. That’s where Link Tracker comes in.

Ensure backlinks are active and have the right placement

While working on the backlink profile for specific pages, check links in Link Tracker to promote pages properly. Gather a list of URLs where you published guest posts during the outreach campaign. Upload this list to Link Tracker and check the backlinks leading to your social media or a company website from these guest posts.

Stay updated about any issues related to affiliate links on partner websites

This includes issues like links not being accessible, incorrect attributes or tags being used, and more. Inform partners about the detected issues to solve them and keep driving traffic to your site.

Spot internal linking issues

Set up a project with a list of referring URLs and a target URL to ensure that link juice is effectively distributed across pages. Fix broken links and incorrect attributes.

Ensure that newly acquired backlinks are properly set up

Monitor issues with meta tags, attributes, and link accessibility. Reach out to the referring website to fix issues and maximize the results of your link-building efforts.

How to Create a Project?

Set up a project and start monitoring backlinks:

The dashboard contains a list of created projects and a brief summary for each:

• Project name.
• The number of URLs uploaded to the project.
• The number of pages available for indexing that don’t have any issues.
• The number of pages that need your attention.
• The date of the project creation and the last update.

Once the crawling is complete, open the project to see the backlink statuses and weview those that require your revision.

To get the latest information, update a project any time, and it’ll re-crawl the links.

How to Analyze Backlinks Within a Backlink Tracker Project?

A project contains the following columns:

• Referring page. A page that contains a link to the target page.
• Internal links. The number of internal links on a page.
• External links. The number of external links from a page.
• Target page. A page that URLs refer to.
• Status. The status of a backlink.
• Last update. The date when a link was last crawled.

Delete, update or create projects with the buttons at the top.

Backlink Statuses

There are 3 types of statuses:

A backlink may have different warnings and errors. It can have a few Warnings at the same time.

Possible warnings

1. The href attribute is missing

The href attribute is used in HTML code within an tag to create a clickable link – hyperlink. Links without a href attribute are not accessible since there is no hyperlink.

2. Anchor is empty

An anchor text tells a user and a search engine bot what the linked page is about. When it's left empty, a bot can still technically follow the link within the website's code, but regular users won't see any visible link on the webpage. Without any text, it’s impossible to create a hyperlink.

3. Page is closed by the "nofollow" meta tag

A “Nofollow” meta tag instructs bots not to crawl links on the page and not to pass a link juice to them.

4. Page is not canonical

Missing or misused canonical tag can lead to duplicate content on a site. When a search engine detects multiple pages with similar or identical content, it may have difficulty determining which page should be indexed and displayed in search results.

5. Attributes "rel=ugc" and/or "sponsored" found

The UGC link attribute indicates that a link was placed in user-generated content, i.e. reviews, comments, forums. The Sponsored link attribute indicates a paid link.

6. Attribute "rel=nofollow" found

A rel="nofollow" attribute tells the crawlers to ignore the link, not to follow it, and not to pass the link juice to it.

Possible errors

1. Error 40x

A link returns a client error code response. The reason may be that the Serpstatbot's IPs are blocked on the referring domain, link requests authorization or provided access, the URL does not exist at all, etc.

2. Error 50x

A link returns a server error code response. The reason may be that the server encountered an internal issue, got an invalid response, is under maintenance, overloaded, etc.

3. SSL certificate error

A domain has a certificate issue: invalid, expired, improperly formatted or installed, not trusted, etc. Browsers usually display a warning message to users opening a website, informing them that it is not secure.

4. Domain is not in the DNS

A domain is not reachable, and the cause may lay in improperly configured nameservers or A records, an unregistered or expired domain.

5. No content on the page

A page returns no content or a 204 error code because the body tag is empty. Thus, the backlink is missing on this page.

6. Link was not found

The target link was not found in the code of a page.

7. Page is closed in robots.txt

A domain has a command in its robots.txt file that prevents some or all crawlers from accessing the page.

8. Page is closed by "noindex" meta tag

A page containing a "noindex" meta tag which prohibits search engines from indexing webpage content.

9. Page is closed in x-robots

The X-Robots-Tag is another way to restrict bots from crawling and indexing a page.

10. Page connection timeout error

A page took more than 10 seconds to respond.

The formula for spending credits is simple: 1 source URL = 1 credit from the Tools module.

Check how many credits you have left in My account.

Still have questions? Contact our technical support team in chat.