Linkback checker for sites I don't own

November 7, 2018 8:36 PM

My boss has asked me to find out (as best I can) how many times a particular page on a website (3 separate sites) has been linked to, tweeted or shared.

These websites have published my boss's work (or her colleagues), but they've been a little unhelpful with this information. I'm way down the chain, so there's no point in me trying to communicate with the site owners. I've tried searching on the link, but either I get far fewer results than there should be, or I get false positives. Any ideas? Prefer free or really cheap.

posted by b33j to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

This can be done with a lot of SEO tools. ahrefs and SEMRush are two i know of, plus one on kwfinder.com. moz.com might have one as well — there are quite a few, and the quality and accuracy is roughly relative to the price paid. The most expensive ones usually give a few searches away for free, so try that first. AHrefs is probably the biggest and most accurate (and most expensive) right now. You want to google “backlink analysis tools” or similar.
posted by cgg at 10:27 PM on November 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Google’s link: operator does a lot of what you want, but the results are just a sampling these days (the historical unfiltered version was a bit too useful to SEO types trying to reverse engineer Google’s ranking algorithm, or so I hear).
posted by w0mbat at 9:18 AM on November 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

BuzzSumo is also a useful tool for checking for social shares to different pages.

SEOs will debate this endlessly, but I find ahrefs does the best job for backlink discovery.
posted by Vhanudux at 11:54 AM on November 8, 2018

It's not an extraordinarily useful tool, but it's free: you can use Facebook's Sharing Debugger to see the total number of likes, shares and comments for a given URL. There's not much there beyond that single number, unfortunately.

I also just tried linkminer.com and it seems to work pretty well. There is a limited number of free backlinks lookups per day (100 if you register for a free account).
posted by vert canard at 7:13 AM on November 9, 2018