Having deadlines and targets to meet when link building can be extremely stressful. One day you’re on top of your link targets, the next you’re overwhelmed with the amount of links you’ve yet to build.
This is a common occurrence for many link builders.
And it doesn’t feel good.
When these days hit, it’s great to discover some links you may have recently built, but have yet to discover went live.
These little wins can make a massive difference to any link builder’s motivation. So whether it’s out of pure desperation, or simply because you’re unsure whether certain links have yet to go live, read on to discover every possible method to discover any new links you may have built.
The Link Discovery Techniques
- Backlink software. Obviously!
- The Trusty Old Email
- Google (site: + url/company name) Search
- Analytics Referral Traffic
- Google Search Console ( Previously Webmasters Tools)
- Good Old Cut and Paste
- The Instalink Technique
1. Backlink Software. Obviously!
Okay. It may seem obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been waiting on a link, just to discover it in Ahrefs, Majestic or OSE (this is also the order in which I would check in the various backlinking tools. Ahrefs seems to index new links pretty quickly, through to OSE which seems to update new links about twice a year!)
To be honest, this isn’t even so much of a technique. More of do this before you continue on to any of the other techniques.
Gifs are below displaying how to find new links in Ahrefs, OSE and Majestic
Ahrefs
2. The Trusty Old Email
If you’ve been waiting on a link for any length of time. There’s no harm in contacting a webmaster to ask how they are getting on with adding the link.
Keep the email short and friendly. Quite often you’ll find that the website owner has simply forgot to add your link (Remember them adding a link to their website is far more important to you than it is to them).
Example email below (with notes in red):
[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”autopx” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]Hi WEBMASTER’S NAME,
I hope you’re well. <- No harm in being polite, it also doesn’t make you sound so needy.
I just wanted to check in and see if you’d had an opportunity to add the link suggestion I made last week? <- Even though you know the link isn’t live, it’s good to sound like you are just asking how they are getting on.
Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. <- Genuinely be willing to help out the webmaster.
Speak soon, <- From experience speak soon gets a higher response rate over “thanks” or “yours sincerely”.
YOUR NAME [/dropshadowbox]
Email without notes:
Hi WEBMASTER’S NAME,
I hope you’re well. I just wanted to check in and see if you’d had an opportunity to add the link suggestion I made last week? Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.
Speak soon,
YOUR NAME
3. Google (site: + url/company name) Search
Unfortunately I lack the skills of someone like Brian Dean from Backlinko to come up with awesome names for different techniques, so this techniques shall be titled: Google (site: + url/company name) Search.
Very Catchy.
This technique is simple and (sometimes) effective.
If you know the site you’re looking for the link on then simply use the mighty power of Google search strings to check for new links.
Take a look at the example below, to see this technique in action:
1. Let’s imagine I’m building a link for my client “Granite Bay Golf Club”. And I’m waiting on a link from sharpeweddings.com. I’ve not heard anything back from the webmaster in a few days, but I’m confident they’re going to add the link.
2. Simply head over to google and search use the strings site: and “client name/url”
3. If you get any results from this search, click on the one that looks most relevant and check if a link has been added.
4. Then all you need to do is visit the site to check that the link has been added:
And there you have it, another link you can add towards your monthly targets.
This technique does rely on Google having indexed or reindexed the page your link is on, so it’s not the fastest way to find new links.
Bonus tip: Simply go on to the site where you’re waiting on a link and use the search bar. Try typing in your website name, website url or if you’ve submitted a guest post, try typing in the title of your article.
4. Analytics Referral Traffic
Once again, this is a relatively simple technique, but it does have the potential to help you find new links extremely quickly.
All you need to do is head over to Google Analytics. On the right hand side scroll down to Acquisition:
Then click Referrals:
This will now bring up every site that has referred traffic to your site. All you need to do now is search through this list to see if there is any new links referring traffic to your site.
All you need to do then is click on the referral traffic link source and check that there is a link pointing to your site.
Beware: There are two things you need to keep in mind when using this technique. Firstly a lot of your referral traffic has the potential to be referral spam, if you’re not up to speed with referral spam and how to get rid of it I highly recommend reading this article.
Secondly, once you start looking at referral traffic sources that have only logged one or two sessions on your site, then it’s likely that it’s simply counted a link clicked from within an email you sent.
5. Google Search Console (Previously Webmaster Tools)
I’m often surprised by the amount of people who abandon the tools in the search console. Other than sporadically checking for any issues, or disavow a few links, it’s a very powerful yet under used tool. It’s also great for checking for any new links you may have built.
Once in Google Search Control, on the left hand menu click “Search Traffic”, then “Links to Your Site”:
You’ll then be able to see all the links Google has indexed are linking to you. If you’re seeing zero links built here, then it may just be a case of adding a variant of your domain to either include www. or exclude www. (example: If you currently only have http://acme.com setup, try adding http://www.acme.com)
6. Good Old Cut and Paste
This one needs probably one sentence to explain:
Copy and paste the page url you are trying to build links to into Google. Check results.
7. The Instalink Technique
I’ve saved my favourite technique until the end. I’ve even given it a fancy name.
This technique involves using Scrapebox. I won’t bore you with the same old patter regarding scrapebox…. it’s a black hat tool, but did you know that it can be used for white hat….. blah, blah.
We know. Scrapebox is awesome for ethical link building.
If you don’t own Scrapebox, I highly recommend it if you want to speed up your link building output. This is the only discount I’ve ever found that works – http://kingwarrior.co/scrapebox-discount
Right. Got Scrapebox? Good, then let’s begin:
Please note: This technique works best if you’ve done large scale outreach and you’ve been targetting specific pages to get your links on, i.e. links and resource pages.
Open Scrapebox and head to the addons section.
Click show available addons. You’ll then be shown a list of available addons. Download Scrapebox Dofollow Test
After the plugin has installe, click on the available addons tab again, you should now find a new button called Scrapebox Do Follow Test. Click this and you’ll be shown the following screen.
It doesn’t look like much is going on at the moment, but this is where the magic happens. First you’ll want to open a text document and copy in all the pages you are trying to get links on (sites you have reached out to). Save this document as a notepad file, click Load Target Sites and then open your notepad file.
You’ll then see the following screen:
This is where things get a little bit more creative. In the “Your Website” section you want to check for different variations of what the anchor text for your link may be; it may be the name of your company, a page you’re trying to attract links to, the url of the article or some other variation.
When using this technique I always check using the client’s name, both with and without spaces i.e. abc business and abcbusiness. I also try variations of what a page is about, so if I was promoting a page about coconut water, I’d search for variations of that term.
Once you’ve decided on different variations, type them one at a time into the “Your Website” box.
Click start and Scrapebox will go out and check all your link targets to see if the anchor text appears. If it finds a link it will tell you at the bottom and will also turn the target site text green.
Once Scrapebox has finished checking all potential link targets, export the file and you’ll have instantly found any new links.
One other tip that I highly recommend is keeping one master notepad document which contains every single website you’ve contacted regarding adding your links. This way you can periodically check to see if any new backlinks have been added.
If you know of any other ways to check for new backlinks, please leave a comment below and I’ll get it added to the post.
The post Every Possible Way to Find New Links You’ve Built appeared first on Link Building Matters.