Backlinks are still one of the strongest signals Google uses to decide who ranks. Get good links pointing at your site and you climb. It’s that simple, and that hard.
Most advice on building backlinks is either dull (“write great content and they’ll come”) or dodgy (“buy a thousand links for £50”). The first is too slow, the second gets you penalised. So here’s the approach that actually works, and the free-then-cheap tools that make it possible.
The shortcut nobody tells beginners
You don’t have to guess which links to chase. Your competitors have already done the hard work — they’re ranking, which means someone is linking to them. Find those links, and you’ve got a ready-made list of sites that link to pages like yours.
That’s the whole strategy: see who links to the people beating you, then go and earn the same links. It’s not glamorous. It just works.
To do it, you need a backlink checker — a tool that shows you every site pointing at any URL you give it.
The free backlink checkers worth using
You can get a surprising amount for nothing.
Google Search Console shows the links pointing at your site — top linking sites, most-linked pages, the lot. Free, accurate, straight from Google. The catch: it only shows your own links, not your competitors’.
Ahrefs’ free backlink checker is the best free option for spying on competitors. It shows the top 100 strongest backlinks to any domain, from a database second only to Google’s. The limit is in the name — top 100, and not much detail.
OpenLinkProfiler is the generous one, giving you up to 1,000 links free with freshness and spam signals.
Between them, these will get a beginner a long way. But you’ll hit the same wall everyone does: the free tools show you some links, in some detail, and stop right where it gets useful.
Where I’d spend a little money: LinkMiner
When you’re serious about link building, you want to see the full picture and — crucially — judge link quality, not just count links. A link from the BBC and a link from a spam directory are not the same thing, and a good tool tells you which is which.
I use LinkMiner, part of the Mangools suite. It’s a clean, focused backlink checker that shows you who links to any site, the strength of each link, the anchor text, and whether a link is worth chasing or worth ignoring. No clutter, no PhD required.
The reason I reach for it over the big expensive suites is the same reason I recommend Mangools generally: it does what most people actually need at a fraction of the price. Plans start around $29 a month, and there’s a 10-day free trial with no card required — long enough to pull the backlink profiles of your three biggest competitors and build a proper target list.
Try LinkMiner free for 10 days
What to actually do with the list
Once you can see your competitors’ backlinks, the work is straightforward:
Look for the sites that link to several of your competitors but not to you — those are the most likely to link to you too. Resource pages, “best of” roundups, and blogs in your niche are the easy wins. Then reach out with something genuinely worth linking to: a better article, a useful tool, an original take. The tool finds the door. You still have to knock.
Skip the link farms and the £50-for-1,000-links sellers entirely. Those links don’t help, and the cleanup when Google notices costs more than the links ever did.
The honest summary
Start free: Search Console for your own links, Ahrefs’ free checker to peek at competitors. When you’re ready to do this properly, LinkMiner’s free trial will show you exactly which links your rivals have that you don’t.
Because the fastest way to build backlinks isn’t to invent a clever campaign. It’s to copy the homework of the sites already beating you.
Affiliate disclosure: some links above are affiliate links. If you sign up through them it costs you nothing extra, and it helps keep this site running. I only recommend tools I’ve actually used.