Execution Time: about 10 minutes
Goal: Have a reliable way to monitor on a regular basis all your Backlinks.
Ideal Outcome: Link monitoring tools are crawling the internet looking for links to your site and let you know whenever there’s a new link (or a change on existing links).
Why this is important: It’s a good idea to set up link monitoring to know if your content is earning links or if your link building campaigns are working. And also to monitor the quality of those links.
Where this is done: Using Monitor Backlinks, Ahref, or Google Search Console web page.
When this is done: Ideally as soon you put your website online.
Who does this: Owner of the website or the person in charge of analytics.

In 10-min you’ll be able to analyze and track your backlinks

Environment setup:

We recommend that you use Google Chrome browser to navigate the web.

How To Set Up Backlinks Monitoring?

Creating MonitorBacklinks Account

Go to the MonitorBacklinks website.
Click on “Start your free trial”.

The trial is available for 30 days.
After that time you will be able to choose a payment plan suitable for you.

Enter “Your Email Address”, come up with “Your desired password”. Check that you are not a robot and click on “Create Account”.

Now you have to confirm your email address.

Open your mailbox. You should find mail from “Monitor Backlinks”. Open it.

Click on the provided link to confirm your email…

…and you will be redirected back to Monitor Backlinks site. Here you have to add your domain for monitoring. You can add it using Google Analytics(1), or manually(2).

Adding your domain using Google Analytics

Step prerequisites: You need to have Google Analytics set for your website for this step. Check our tutorial 3 and tutorial 4 to find out how to do that.

Click on “Add using Analytics”.

Choose Google Account associated with your Google Analytics.

Click on “Allow”.

Choose desired Google Analytics “profile”.

Click on “Connect”.

Optional Steps

After you connect/add your domain you will be presented with some additional (optional) steps. You can choose to configure them or skip.

Add Competitors

You can add competitors to your website. It will allow you to check their backlinks and keyword rankings.

Add Keywords

You can add keywords to your rankings to see how they are ranking when you get new

links.

Adding your domain manually

Choose to “Add without Analytics”.

Enter your website URL and click on “Add domain”.

Now you only need to skip or fill in optional steps mentioned in the earlier part of this tutorial.

No matter which method you choose to add your domain to, you will be able to check your backlinks monitor by selecting “Backlinks” from the top menu.

You have to wait for about 24h for your data to appear.

You can also add links manually or by uploading a list.

Setting Up Backlinks Monitoring using Ahrefs.com

Ahrefs.com is a paid service but it is one of the best solutions on the market.

If you decide to use it simply create an account and choose a suitable plan.

Go to Ahrefs.com
Once you create your account, enter your credentials and click on “Sign in”.

When you will be moved to your dashboard, click on “New project”.

Now you will be able to choose to “Import”(1) your project from Google Search Console or to “Add manually”(2).

Importing an existing project from Google Search Console

If you choose to import your project from GSC, simply click on “Import”.

Choose your Google account associated with your GSC.

Grant Ashrefs required permissions by clicking “Allow”.

Confirm your choices by clicking “Allow” one more time.

Your project should now be moved to your Ashrefs account.

Add project manually

Click on “Add manually”.

Enter your URL (you should see hat “Your domain is accessible”).

Be sure to set “Subdomains” next to your URL as we are going to audit our backlinks.

Click on “Continue”.

Now you have to verify your domain ownership.

Verify with Google Search Console

If you have Google Search Console enabled for your site this is the easiest and recommended solution.

Simply click on “Connect Google Account”.

Choose your Google account associated with GSC.

Then click on “Allow”.

Verify with DNS record

If you choose to verify your ownership using DNS record you have to add TXT record (provided below that option) below the DNS configuration within your domain provider DNS settings.

Remember that this method may take some time to process.

Verifying by uploading HTML file

If you choose to verify using that method, you should download provided HTML file and upload it to your server (you should ask your developer to upload your file to your server).

Verifying using HTML Tag

If you choose to proceed with this method you have to put provided meta tag within your homepage’s code. It should go in the <head> section, before the first <body> section.

Verifying using meta tag on WordPress site

On the left-side menu choose “Appearance”.

Then click on “Theme Editor”.

From the list on the right side choose “Theme Header”.

Then the meta tag provided by Ahrefs just below “<head>” line.

Click on “Update File”.

After successful verification, you will be granted with “Ownership verified” message

After verification, click on “Continue”.

Setting audit options

In the “Schedule” tab you can set your desired setting on when to run audits (set according to your needs).

In the “URL sources” tab, be sure to check “Backlinks”.

Leave options in “Crawl settings” tab unchanged.

Click on “Continue”.

In the next step, you can add keywords to track. Feel free to add your keywords to track (or leave it blank) and click on “Continue”.

Next window will give you an opportunity to add competitors to analyze. You can add your competitors (or leave it blank) and click on “Continue”.

After that, you will be redirected to your dashboard. You will see your website here. You have to wait sometime for Ashrefs to crawl your website.

Checking your backlinks

Once Ashrefs finish crawling your website, click on the dropdown menu next to your URL.

There you will find an entire section dedicated to backlinks.

Click on “Referring domains”.

Referring domains, also known as “linking domains,” are external websites that direct visitors to your site. These domains contain backlinks that drive traffic and views to your specific web pages.

Here you will be able to check the list of your referring domains and analyze them.

By clicking “Backlinks” from “Backlink Profile section…

…You will produce a list of all of your backlinks. Here you can check and analyze them.

Checking your backlinks with Google Search Console

You can always check some of your backlinks using Google Search Console. To do it you need to have Google Search Console enabled for your website. Check our tutorial 8 on how to do it.

Log In to your Google Search Console
Choose “Links” from the left side menu.

Here you will be able to see your “External Links”.

And “Internal Links”.

From here you have to manually look for any backlinks. This solution is more time consuming but it is free. All is set! From now on, you’ll be able to know how to set up backlinks monitoring to monitor your backlinks!

Do you know?

In order to have better SEO ranking, find out more about my 100+ SEO CHECKLIST, download a copy of this most comprehensive SEO CHECKLIST here :

How To Set Up Backlinks Monitoring？