Which Software Best Determines the Percentage of Live Links?

“Ultimately the best possible results are achieved when several data sources, including the ones mentioned below, Semrush, Ahrefs, and others, are combined, deduplicated, and audited by an independent third party expert.”

“Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are excellent and free sources for samples of live backlinks. Albeit the respective sample limits of 100 thousand for Google Search Console and 250 thousand for Bing Webmaster Tools can be overcome when the data is downloaded and deduplicated on a regular basis, something I strongly recommend as a best practice for any website owner to do.”

“In order to check the percentage of live links, I’ve always used Ahrefs. If you type your website into the Site Explorer and then click Backlinks on the left-hand side, this will show you which links are live. Following this, there is much more you can do, such as analyze the authority of the websites your links are coming from, whether it’s dofollow or nofollow link, what the referring page is, and much more. When it comes to backlink analysis, Ahrefs is and always will be my go-to software.”

“If you’re looking to monitor backlinks to a certain website, you cannot go wrong with Ahrefs. Here at Digital Funnel HQ, we use Ahrefs backlink checking tools on a daily basis, and it offers a comprehensive analysis of an entire backlink profile, including dofollow,nofollow links, anchor texts, image backlinks, and more. Ahrefs is actually the second most active web crawler in the world behind Google, which means that they have the most updated and most extensive backlink database in the entire industry.”

“In the digital marketing community, Ahrefs has an excellent reputation for backlink crawling, but with Semrush’s latest backlink technology update, I am not sure how much of a difference there might be. I am currently a user of Semrush, and I don’t feel the need to invest in a separate tool just to get a slightly higher percentage of live links. If I was a professional SEOer, I would want to regularly audit tools for live link analysis, but for general digital marketers, I honestly don’t think that that level of granularity is necessary and that if you are invested in 1 of the Big 3, the data will be sufficient for general needs.”

“At MHC, we conduct a lot of manual link audits. To do this, we gather links from as many sources as we can, including a number of third-party tools such as Ahrefs, Majestic, and Moz. It might seem like overkill to pull links from so many sources, but we have found that is the only way to get a comprehensive profile of the live links pointing to a site.

Crawling and discovering live links reliably is a very difficult task, and while the tools are much better than they used to be, none of them so far manage to get them all! For perspective, anecdotally, we would say that Ahrefs is perhaps the most “reliable,” but the number of domains listed in a full backlink profile is often 3 times as many as what Ahrefs will be reporting as the total number of backlinks to a site. So, in this case, “reliability” is quite a subjective concept!”

“I like Screaming Frog because it’s the fastest, but it doesn’t work as well for large sites or sites with tons of JavaScript or other resources because it slows down your machine. That said, it’s the best way to quickly see about live/broken links. Ahrefs is also useful if you want to look at inbound broken links.”

“Ahrefs, Majestic, and other tools have their strengths, but Ahrefs seems to have the biggest dataset. I like to use LinkResearchTools, which extracts data from multiple backlink profiling tools and consolidates them into a single platform. This gives a more complete picture of the backlink profile than using a single tool.”