Quick Tricks to Checking Your Backlinks

When you’re working on SEO and building quality backlinks, anyone who does it actively wants to know how effective each link is and how well it’s doing. Well, there are some specific methods to check on the quality of your links, when they’re crawled, and more, so you can know details about each of your backlinks.

Knowing When It’s Crawled

So you got a great PR6 backlink, but you can’t wait until it’s actually indexed so you can start getting some of that link juice love back to your site. How do you know when it’s been crawled? With Google, there are a few ways:

• Check the cache – This is the easy way, most people are aware of this. Simply query keywords that match the page you are waiting for to be updated. When the page shows in the listings, click on the “Cached” link next to the URL in the SERP. This will show the page that is the most recent copy that has been crawled, as well as displaying a date/time on when that cache was made.
• Search the URL – You may not always have a specific query to find the page you want to locate to check for your update. However, if you know the URL for the page you want to check, there’s a definite way. To query it for sure, you can put in the URL into the following query string in Google: “site:sampleurl.com/directory” This will search for that specific page and show listings for only matching URLs. Then you can see if that page has been crawled and then check the cache to see how recently the last crawl was.
• Search the URL with keywords – This is just a variation on doing the “site:” search. You can add a keyword phrase after the domain/URL to see if any matching pages have been crawled. If your link is part of specific content you know unique keywords for or if you have specific anchor text you placed, you can put this as your keyword phrase. If it’s been crawled, it will come up in the results, and you know your link is active.

Checking the Quality of Backlink

How good is your backlink? You can check the PageRank for that page, but PR is a value that’s not truly shown, we only see the “Toolbar PageRank” value, and this is only updated five times each year. If the primary domain is established and has a decent PR, that’s promising. But there’s another way to check how good your link is.

One key factor to determine the quality of backlinking is the level in which the links get seen and shared. How often is the content distributed? Is it only the single link? Is it copied? This is especially important if you’re doing article marketing of any kind.

One easy way to do this is by using Google Alerts. Find a unique keyword phrase for your content – the title, if it’s an article. Then put it into quotes and set an alert using Google Alerts. This will show every time Google crawls a new instance of that unique keyword phrase. You’ll see how many times the content is distributed or shared, and can check to see how many of these are providing additional links for you. It can be used for research to find out the best ways to get good backlinks.

Using these methods to check on the quality of your backlinks can help you find good places to continue building links for your SEO. Doing this type of research can improve your SEO results substantially, when done well.