32 Link Building Tools and Softwares

If you’re looking for highly recommended link building tools and software, this guide is for you. Use the “easy links” below to get straight to the tool of your choice.

1. Majestic 

Considered to be one of the top analysis tools, Majestic has been effective in telling you whether or not a site you want to get a link from is authoritative or spammy.

It also allows you to see the topical theme of a website, for example, if the site is in the technology niche (see image below). This helps you decide if a certain domain is worth building links from (both from a relevance and trust standpoint).

Website: Majestic

2. Buzzstream

Undoubtedly, SEO and digital agencies are using Buzzstream to streamline their email outreach process. Its feature to “back and next” every website to quality them properly gives more luxury for link builders to stay on the platform and won’t even need to open a new tab.

Website: Buzzstream

Its best feature, “Buzzmaker” allows you to view or save details of a specific prospect, which are useful basically when personalizing your pitches.

3. Ahrefs

I never tried executing link building campaigns without tapping this tool. It has a lot of features that work wonders in your content creation and link prospecting initiatives.

I’ve covered in this post how to use Ahrefs for link building efforts, but here are some features you should try when getting started with it:

Site Explorer (URL/Domain/Prefix)

Speeding up your link prospecting process by exporting direct backlinks to similar content allows you to exert more effort on other phases of link acquisition, such as content creation and email outreach.

Website: Ahrefs

Properly using URL/Domain/Prefix in extracting certain links that should only pertain to either only to a specific page, whole domain (with or without subdomains is also included in the options), or prefix (e.g. domain.com/resources).

Content Gap

No time for wild guessing. Check the keywords your content competitors are dominating and see if these topics are something you can do better (or 10x than theirs). This is the process of content gap analysis.

New Backlinks

Are your competitors acquiring new links you haven’t seen yet? These are linkers that you can nudge to link to your page as well.

5. Mozbar

Domain Authority of Moz is probably the most common metric used by SEOs and link builders to gauge the site or page’s authority.

Website: Mozbar

When prospecting for links, using Mozbar (install it first in your Chrome Extension) helps you to see the site’s Domain Authority either on the search results itself or by clicking the Moz button once you landed on the page.

6. Ontolo

If you’re a solo-man link building team and trying to scale the link prospecting process at its best, you can use Ontolo to extract link opportunities straight from the platform.

Website: Ontolo

While it’s not guaranteed to have all of them used up for email outreach, you still have to do some qualification, for example in context relevance, to see if these link prospects are actually worth your link building efforts.

Nevertheless, if you have your own web properties and wanted to have a list of hundreds/thousands at hand, Ontolo can help you out.

6. Citation Labs

The value for money, which is in the form of reports, in a Citation Labs platform is incredible. Getting hundreds or thousands of relevant link prospects from the tool itself helps you scale your link prospecting efforts.

For example, if you’re doing guest blogging and resource page link building, you can create custom reports in Citation Labs and it helps you extract pages/domains based on the keywords that you provide.

There are proper ways to use the tool, here are some videos you have to watch to maximize the web product:

Website: Citation Labs

7. Inkybee

The output of the blogger prospecting tool of Inkybee is something you can also acquire through manual search. However, its feature to extract your current Twitter followers that have their own websites and blogs provides the luxury to start building relationships with these potential linkers and create your own list of content promoters.

Website: Inkybee

8. SEMRush

We’ve incorporated SEMRush in our internal processes as one of our link quality/metrics tools. Its basic graph showing the estimated organic traffic growth (and the SEPrice – see below) allows us to check if a blog or site is worth reaching out to.

Website: SEMRush

If you’re an agency working on enterprise blogger outreach campaigns, it is best to use SEMRush for link qualification efforts.

9. Buzzsumo

If you just started in content marketing, you must try Buzzsumo because of its hard-core features to give you an edge in your content marketing campaigns. Its ability to filter results based on content types, date published and in-depth articles (only shows articles with more than 2000 words) are keys to effectively prospect “best content” in your industry.

Website: Buzzsumo

10. SEOQuake

SEOQuake is a productivity tool for active link prospectors. If you are manually looking for high-trafficked guest blogs, for example, and wanted to scale checking their cost/SEPrice, you can use SEOQuake to see those quality metrics (i.e. SEPrice) straight from the search results. This saves time as you don’t need to copy and paste each prospect blog into the SEMRush tool to check the quality of the domain.

Website: SEOQuake

11. Broken Link Building

This Broken Link Building tool from Citation Labs allows you to discover hundreds or thousands of links of resource pages within half an hour. Its Keyword Grader is a useful feature to gauge if there are potential link opportunities within a certain topic or keyword theme, which definitely helps you maximize the link prospecting tool.

Website: Broken Link Building

12. Javascript Bookmarklets

These are bookmarklets that can save minutes of your day. For example, this SERPs bookmarklet allows you to copy URLs of pages/sites seen in search results and paste them into your spreadsheet.

Tried manually plugging a domain into the SEMRush tool? Do this with ease using this bookmarklet.

13. Boomerang

Boomerang is a great email outreach tool that keeps you in the loop both with responsive and non-responsive contacts.

Website: Boomerang

If you want to be reminded of emails that you should have responded to, click its button below the Gmail message platform.

If you don’t hear back from link contacts (bloggers/webmasters), it reminds you after 2 or 3 days, whichever you set.

14. Rapportive

There’s a lot of profile detailing tools that are more updated than Rapportive but I still find it pretty handy for outreach people.

Trying to personalize is heavy if you aren’t able to see straight from Gmail details of people you’re reaching out to. It keeps you away from your screen, by opening new tabs to check out the blog, its about me page, or other details that you need to personalize your pitch.

Rapportive gives you a list of important details about your contact person, helping you to speed up personalization at its best.

Website: Rapportive

15. LinkClump

If you’re giving broken link building a shot, one of your top link building tools should be LinkClump. This aids you in manually finding defunct (broken) links on a certain page, which serves as your value proposition in your email outreach.

Website: LinkClump

Ask potential linkers to replace one of their broken links with a link to your linkable content. This doesn’t work magic, your content should be good enough to be included on the page (contextual relevance is the key).

16. Image Prospector

If you create your own graphics or photographs, other sites have likely copied them without proper attribution. Using Image Prospector, you can quickly find all of these sites and organize an outreach campaign. Emailing each site to request they link back to you will convert effectively and lead to new high-quality in-content backlinks for your website.

Website: Image Prospector

17. MuckRack

I haven’t seen a platform just like MuckRack that can filter lists of journalists and reports based on their respective media outlets and media types. This allows a more targeted approach to being in touch with these content promoters that have high-end exposures.

Website: MuckRack

18. Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach is a constantly-improving blogger outreach web-based product as it delivers new features to offer a smooth outreach flow. Involving ready-made outreach templates makes it easy for someone to dive into this platform (techy know-how isn’t required).

Website: Ninja Outreach

19. Pitchbox

Pitchbox streamlines your link prospecting and outreach process (all-in-one-place). The ability to discover contacts that are reliable at their best, plus automating follow-ups by scheduling at times strategy is what makes the tool a handy platform for high-scale link building.

If you base decisions on data, Pitchbox also allows proper reporting on all phases of the outreach process.

Website: Pitchbox

20. Remove’em

Getting a sense of which links are toxic that needs to be removed allows you to execute link audit for your site. Remove’em has its “R-score” that allows you to filter sites triple times faster. Adding MajesticSEO OpenApps Key as well enables link metrics to be incorporated into the platform.

Website: Remove’em

21. Rmoov

If you are trying to remove links from harmful sites for different clients of yours (after you’ve audited your backlink profiles), it’s so much pain to manually find each contact’s emails and do outreach to them.

Rmoov aids you with that. It does the work to give you the proper contact information. While it isn’t perfect as other tools, it saves you time doing such activity.

Website: Rmoov

22. Siege Media Embed Code Generator

If you don’t have an embed code beneath your infographic, you are missing the opportunity for inbound links.

If the visual content is great (adds value upfront), you will expect publishers and bloggers to republish your infographic on their websites as well. Using this embed code generator eases the pain of creating customized embed codes for each infographic you make.

Website: Embed Code Generator

23. Stylist

If you are into search results in your link building times of the day, Stylist allows you to see links visited just recently, so you won’t have to click them again and quality for potential link opportunities. Saves time. More link prospects every hour.

Website: Stylist

24. Google Sheets

If you want to keep things cost-efficient, use Google Spreadsheets to organize your link building campaigns.

Its accessible and simplest feature to share data with other team members can help new hires to dive into the process instantly.

By using labels/columns to support your needs in terms of link prospecting and outreach, you’ll be able to check all the details and keep everyone in the loop for work.

Website: Google Sheets

25. Wordable

If you are handling several content management accounts, Wordable aids you with uploading content from Google Docs straight to WordPress accounts.

Website: Wordable 

Not only you’ll maximize your time, but you can now create a content publishing process to be eventually provided to your new hires if you’re an agency. This is one way to scale the content-based link acquisition process.

26. HARO

Getting press exposure on top-tier sites (digital PR) like Forbes and Huffington Post creates more exposure for your brand. Whether the citation and mention are linked or unlinked (best if you can get links obviously), you can add that specific exposure to your homepage’s social proof section (i.e. “As Featured In”).

Website: HARO

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is a free PR service that gives you the capacity to reach out to journalists looking for stories related to your industry/brand.

Automating this for proper scaling and for early capture of your stories can save a lot of your time (e.g. using IFTTT).

Matthew Barby detailed a step-by-step process on how to properly use PR services like HARO for acquiring early exposure and editorial links.

27. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Menial tasks can eat some of your time. In link building, qualifying thousands of prospects using certain metrics can easily be outsourced.

Website: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (not a link building tool) can help you outsource link building tasks on a micro-level. For example, if you’re doing broken link building, a huge percentage of your time is spent on reviewing thousands of link prospects, either found manually or using automated tools like Citation Labs. If I’d review it myself, it obviously can eat much of my time, wherein I can just spend $525 to review 5,000 link prospects for example and get 1500 contact information.

Scalable, especially if you only have a handful of resources (members) in your team.

28. LinkResearchTools

When Google releases its real-time update of Penguin, many webmasters have started to take link-audit as part of their regular internal execution.

Website: LinkResearchTools

Using LinkResearchTools gives you the leverage of checking your site’s backlink profile with given own metrics by LRT, such as LRT Power, LRT Trust, and LRT Power*Trust, which then allows you to evaluate the trustworthiness of a particular backlink.

Looking at the backlink profile with the proper context, such as anchor text variation, link types, link status, and so on, allows you to better monitor the health of your website.

29. WhiteSpark

Local businesses should take advantage of WhiteSpark as one of the primary local link building tools. If you doing local link building, the said tool allows you to do that on a scale.

Website: WhiteSpark

The available local submission pages also give you the capacity to do the task in minutes only, which if you handle multiple accounts is automatically can be delegated or outsourced to a certain person.

30. Search Metrics

Aside from SEMRush, we also use SearchMetrics to evaluate a website’s trust and authority. By noticing a sudden drop on a website’s graph of organic traffic, might indicate a penalty caused by spammy link building executions. These would allow us to identify the most suitable sites to target.

Website: Search Metrics

31. URL Profiler

Link qualification is one of the extensive tasks in link building. It takes time but if you can automate it, much better for your team.

URL Profiler solves that problem of trying to search the Moz DA, Ahrefs rank, or Majestics’ metrics of each of your link prospects.

Website: URL Profiler

Install the software, upload your file of backlink targets, then check with metrics you prefer to use (Moz, Ahref, Majestics, etc..). Wait for a few minutes and then done. You’ll get a CSV file of all the target websites with their respective numbers.

32. Open Site Explorer

I rarely use OSE but if the Mozbar doesn’t function properly, we simply go to Open Site Explorer website and check the site or blog’s Domain Authority manually.

Website: Open Site Explorer

Your Turn…

Do you know any tool that should be added to this post?

Leave a quick comment below.

I’ll be more than happy to reply to comments and answer questions.