25 Best FREE Link Building Tools (+ Chrome Extensions)

Link building can be challenging. It can also be EXPENSIVE.

Whether you’re a marketer, business owner or blogger who wants to build backlinks, it is important to know which outreach methods are best for your situation.

Luckily, there are several free link building tools that allow you to generate high-quality links through various outreach strategies.

The Best FREE Link Building Tools for SEO

Link building is one of the most important aspects to any SEO strategy. Whether you want to improve your search engine rankings or drive traffic, a link building campaign can provide you with a solution for your problem.

Regardless of how you are planning to get inbound links (content marketing, link prospecting, guest posts, broken link building etc), things can get expensive just with the tool costs alone.

However, many people do not realize that there are free tools available on the internet that help them build links very easily and quickly.

Check out these free link building tools:

1. Hunter.io

Hunter.io easily find emails and check their authenticity with Hunter.

This tool allows you to search for email addresses while also gathering information on what company the person is working for, their position in that company and how many connections they have on LinkedIn.

2. Google Alerts

Google Alerts allow you to follow any topic or search term and get a daily e-mail with all the newest and latest content published about it so you can (hopefully) land new links.

Get an automated up to date list of everything even mentioned anywhere on the web that has your selected keywords in it; every day, every hour, no matter when you created the alert.

3. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (or Webmaster Tools if you wanna get old school) is a free, almost-too-good-to-be true tool for digital marketing professionals to manage their website’s presence on Google.

It includes a number of cool features for finding information about your site’s performance across those important search engines. But for the purpose of link building, you can get a basic (and free) overview of how many links your site has.”

4. Ahrefs Free Broken Link Checker

Ahrefs Free Broken Link Checker detects all broken links on any website.

The crawler can find dead internal backlinks and external backlinks, reporting them with information about the URL parameters and pages found in each link anchor text. All you have to do is drop a a domain in the tool, hit enter, and just seconds later it will show the list of all pages with broken links or errors with red icons.

There’s no signup needed either to see the results!

5. OpenLinkProfiler

OpenLinkProfiler pulls pretty in-depth information about the links pointing to any website.

This includes internal and external links, such as Google’s indexing of a page, social media shares, and so on. It also tells you what websites are being linked to by each other. How pages link to one another can show us who they feel close ties with in their online community, whether it be competitors like your own company website or complementary opportunities.

FREE Backlink Checkers for SEO on a Budget

How can I check backlinks for free?

There’s so many of them, this part of the blog post gets its own section!

Backlink checkers are a great way to learn more about the backlinks that are pointing towards your website. The only problem with free tools is that there’s no guarantee they will provide you with accurate results.

Therefore, it’s important for marketers to understand what their limitations are before relying on them for any kind of decision making process.

Here are some free to use tools for checking your backlinks:

6. Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker

Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker is an SEO tool that will allow you to see which websites are linking back to any website of your choice.

It uses their index of over 15 trillion live backlinks (more than twice the number of all the pages in the world’s biggest search engine) and allows you to check for links, find link sources, and analyze what keyword phrases are driving traffic.

7. SE Ranking backlink checker

By using the SE Ranking backlink checker, you will gain comprehensive insights into your backlink profile, checking your referring domains along with their critical metrics. In addition to information about where you stand in terms of your link profile, you will receive data on where your competitors are gaining a competitive edge. This includes information about their pages with the most backlinks, anchor texts, and link types.

8. Seobility

Seobility is a free backlink checking tool that analyzes your and any competitor website backlinks. It also reveals old, nofollow or spam links on the opposing site – helping you identify which of their links are working and what can be blacklisted for optimization purposes.

The backlink checker will generate an overview report that shows how many existing quality backlinks each website has (in its own ranking) as well as how many new, high-quality links should be built to improve performance.

9. Majestic

Majestic offers a range of backlink analysis tools to help you analyze your health in terms of Domain, Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

You want to ensure that your rankings are as they should be and believe the better-suited Majestic helps us with information on links, anchors within domains, linking root domains associated with a given domain, trust flow from external sites which will reveal overall authority and link power for each domain

10. Semrush

The Semrush backlink checker is a powerful tool for those who want to follow up on any website’s backlinks by gathering data on its functionalities.

Its strength lies in the countless different analyses it can perform which are all based around providing you with analytics on specific URL links targeting your webpages.

Need to register an account to use.

11. Moz

The Moz Link Explorer displays the link’s domain, linking page and anchor text, as well as its domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA).

You can use this tool to spy on your competition to get an idea of what content they are using or find out what sites link to your blog.

Need to register an account to use.

12. Monitor Backlinks Free Backlink Checker

Monitor Backlinks has a free backlink checker that will help you find and examine the number of backlinks on your site or those from any competitor.

The FREE platform provides rank, nofollow detection, indexed URL’s seen by crawlers and many more features. Gain insight into what links are helping or hurting your ranking to make better strategic moves with bigger impact.

13. Backlink Checker (With Historical and New/Lost Link Data)

Say what you want about Neil Patel, he has got a free backlink checker…

Uncover valuable insights for your business, find out who links to you and your competitors, gain valuable intelligence about their industry and get content to link to. The free backlink checker tool is a quick way to build links through outreach.

14. SmallSEOTools Backlink Checker

SmallSeoTools offers a nice backlink checker tools to find and research links.

Enter your domain and click the button to check backlinks for free. Our tool also helps rank website on Google search result pages, our customers have seen an increase in rankings after checking their backlinks with us!

This is a complete analysis that will be updated daily with any changes like alerts when we see links that don’t work correctly anymore or someone else has already taken this link off their site completely.

15. SEO Review Tools Backlink Checker

The SEO Review Tool Backlink Checker is a quick and free tool that provides both in-depth information about backlinks to your site as well as recommendations for link building opportunities.

It takes only seconds to use the checker: enter your website URL into the form, click “Check Links”, and then scroll through all of the related data available on this page.

16. Linkgraph

Linkgraph has a free Backlink Analysis Checker (and other tools) finds things like domain name errors, broken links, misbehaving redirects, indexing issues and more with just a few clicks.

17. Rankwatch

Rankwatch is a backlink analysis tool that enables you to find out who are your top referring sites, amount of keywords driving traffic to your website and how well positioned in google search it currently is.

It provides an exhaustive report where you will get notified about all the latest changes in our rankings including updates on these matters as: position graph, keyword density, linking domain types and much more – without any interruption from ads or other offer information

Free Chrome Extensions for Link Builders

There are lots of browser extensions in the Chrome store that can make your life easier as a link builder. Check them out:

18. Check My Links Extension

With a simple click of the button, “Check My Links” will crawl through your webpage and automatically identify all broken links that you might have missed.

19. Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar

Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar is an extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers that instantly checks your page’s SEO.

It provides you with concise feedback about the result, broken link report to help fix dead links, redirect tracer tool so you can spot any unintended redirects, and local search simulator to help optimize your local business listings.

20. Detailed SEO Extension

The Detailed SEO extension is an insightful SEO extension that will provide on-demand insights to any web page, blog post, YouTube video or social media post.

The extension can be useful for doing keyword research as it provides information about keyword usage, backlinks, social signals (likes and shares), on-page optimisations, schema and broken link issues.

21. Buzzstream Buzzmarker

BuzzMarker is a Chrome extension that lets you use the BuzzStream’s features anywhere on the internet.

It also features many advanced tools, in-context customer profiles when available, project summaries for bids and proposals, Google Alerts integration which automatically saves all alerts to your list (ideal for salespeople), Team Watchlist that includes calendars and task reminders so team members can be more productive together – even if they’re not in the same office.

22. SEOminion

SEO Minion is a website crawler tool that helps you in your daily SEO tasks, such as On-Page SEO Analysis, Broken Link Checking, SERP Preview and more.

23. NoFollow

The NoFollow extension is a simple but helpful tool for monitoring the spread of nofollow links. It supports NOFOLLOW, UGC, and SPONSORED attribute values and search engine specific robot meta tags.

24. Scraper

Scraper is a very simple data mining extension for doing online research when you need to get data into spreadsheet form quickly. It is intended as an easy-to-use tool for intermediate to advanced users who are comfortable with XPath.

The extension can scrape tables, lists, or even the whole webpage and put it in an editable format on Google Docs that you can manipulate.

25. gInfinity

gInfinity is a Chrome extension that adds infinite scroll to the SERPs. Pretty useful for scraping a bunch of prospects in one go.

Summary

If you’ve been around the block a few times in SEO, I’m sure you know that having a solid link building strategy is and always will be one of the most important aspects for ranking well on search engines.

If your site isn’t building a solid backlink profile by getting links from authoritative sites, then you are simply not going to rank high.

Are link building tools going to be a silver bullet for suddenly landing loads of quality links?

Possibly not. But they can help speed up the learning curve, especially if you are on a tight budget.

Think we’ve missed a free link building tool? Let us know and we’ll get it added.