How to Check if your Hard Earned Links are Still Live

Today I’ll show you 4 ways you can bulk check if a set of backlinks are still linking to your website; in addition to that, you’ll learn if they use the rel=”nofollow” tag and how to be updated automatically should either of those things ever change.

Checking if backlinks are live is one of those things that as SEOs we find ourselves doing a lot. If you’re still doing this manually, you’re doing it wrong. There’s lot’s of tools out there, that can automate this. Some are paid and some are free. BuzzStream is my tool of choice when it comes to monitoring links, so that’s the one I’ll go into more detail on how to use.


1 – BuzzStream (Paid)
BuzzStream is a paid tool but it’s well worth it. Even if you don’t use BuzzStream for the outreach part, you should still use it as a database for any links you build. If you get into the habit of adding any links you build into BuzzStream, it makes the monitoring process very easy. There are three parts of this tool, the import, running a check and then scheduling the check to run and automatically email you if there are any changes.

Importing Links
Once logged in, click the import button at the top of the screen.

Then select either import from CSV or just paste a list of URLs. You might consider adding a tag to the URLs if you just want to check a batch of links, this makes it easier to select only those links when doing the check. In my case I just added the tag “Craig”.

Checking the Backlinks
Once the import is complete, click on the “Link Monitoring” tool at the top of the screen, filter to show only those links that have the tag that you added, select all links, then finally the “Check Backlinks” button as shown in the image below. BuzzStream will send you an email when it’s complete.

The email you receive has details of all links but this is what the summary looks like:

As you can see, the report shows that 4 of the links I imported don’t link to Distilled and 2 of them have nofollowed links. This tool also checks changes to anchor text, significant changes to PageRank, unique visitors, outbound links, index status, “flagged words;” plus more, it’s amazing.

Scheduling Checks
Now that you have those links in the database, you never need to think about them again, all you need to do Is set up scheduling to email you should any changes be made to the site. The steps to do this are shown below:

1 – In the top right of the page click on the settings (shown by a little cog)

2 – Click on manage projects

3 – Click on the project you want to monitor – there are three buttons, click the one on the left, which is “edit”.

4 – A popup will appear, do nothing. Just click the button at the bottom that says “Next: Edit Backlink Tracking” and you’ll be taken to a screen shown below. You then have three options. Add the domain you are building links to, check the box that says you want to be sent a report every two weeks and select your name as the user. Finally add any words that you want to be flagged. As it says in the image below, adding keywords to be flagged can help pick up if any sites have been hacked or become spammy. That’s it, hit save and you’ll get an email every two weeks telling you if any of your backlinks have been removed.