16 Best Link Building Software Applications

If you want to improve your domain rating and move up the rankings on the search engine results page, then you have to build links, plain and simple. 

Link building is time-consuming, which is why people typically search out a link building service to take over some or all of the leg work, but there is a wide range of link building software out there (free and paid) to make it more efficient. 

At dofollow.io, we make use of the following link building software to help us with everything from research to strategic campaign execution:

These tools complement everything from reverse engineering backlink profiles to determining link building opportunities to collecting email addresses and doing high-volume outreach. 

They are geared towards different aspects of a link building campaign, from guest posting to researching and developing linkable assets. 

Some have free trials, some will require a decent-sized budget in order to afford on a monthly basis. 

There are even tools that will improve your effectiveness with platforms like HARO. 

These are link building tools we use on a regular basis to secure amazing backlinks from relevant, high-authority sites for our clients and ourselves. They are: 

• Respona
• SE Ranking
• Ahrefs–The Best Tool for New Link-Building Opportunities
• Hunter.io–The Best Tool For Finding Emails
• Pitchbox–The Best Outreach Tool
• Majestic SEO–Best Alternative Data Source
• Mailshake 
• Buzzstream
• HARO
• MOZ
• Google Disavow Links Tool
• SEMrush
• Google Alerts
• Check My Links
• Linkody
• Monitor Backlinks

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Top 3 Tools

Our top three link building software are as follows: 

• Best tool for searching out link building prospects: Ahrefs
• Best for email prospecting: Hunter.io
• Best tool for Email Outreach: Respona

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an industry standard and is one of the most complete software out there. It is packed with features and functionalities designed to make link prospecting in-depth, accurate and less time-consuming. 

If you are serious about upping your link building game and creating a stellar backlink profile, then Ahrefs should be considered a must-have. 

Hunter.io

Hunter.io is used to find large numbers of email addresses. It has a great track record for finding up-to-date contact information (which is the defining attribute of good prospecting software). 

If you aren’t using Hunter-io (or something similar), you are doing manual outreach, which is incredibly time-consuming and, once you hit a certain scale, simply not sustainable. 

Respona

Respona is known as a relationship-based software that allows you to build an end-to-end link building process. 

Respona has established a reputation for helping link builders find the correct people to outreach to so that you can make contact and start the link building process the right way. 

Now that we’ve briefly broken down the foundational tools, let’s get into all of the link-building software tools on the list in more detail. 

Link Building Software #1: Respona

Respona is a comprehensive blogger outreach tool designed to make setting up and launching an email campaign simple. It is multipurpose and can be used for everything from digital PR, link building, sales or marketing. 

Respona is kitted out with all sorts of great features, including Google search engine integration for easier prospecting, giving you metrics like Domain Rating and Ahrefs ranking so that you can make better decisions about where to build links. 

It also includes a very intuitive email finder so you can quickly locate contact information for webmasters, editors and other relevant employees. 

Why We Love It

Respona provides easy-to-follow walkthroughs that take you step-by-step through the creation and launching of outreach campaigns and makes keeping track of your prospects and your relationships with them easy. 

This is one of the most useful link software we’ve used and has contributed massively to our ability to find and build high-quality backlinks for our clients. It’s amazing for: 

• Highly automatable/customizable
• Easy prospecting
• Great analytics and reporting features

Read Respona’s reviews on G2.

Link Building Tool#2: SE Ranking

If you’re looking for the total package when it comes to backlink analysis, SE Ranking lets you research the quality of your backlink profile as well as that of your competitors. 

All you have to do is input the domain you are interested in and SE Ranking will provide both its domain and page trust–the company’s proprietary metric that evaluates whether a particular domain is deserving of a high ranking. 

Why We Love It

An important part of link building strategy is researching new and lost backlink opportunities on a referring domain and the dofollow and nofollow link ratio for all of the links found.

SE Ranking is one of the best link building software for this because it lets you estimate the probability of a dofollow backlink from a given site. 

The tool also enables you to analyze the regions that provide the most referrals to a page and see helpful visualizations of anchor text data. 

Another great SE Ranking feature is the competitor analysis tool that compares your domain against the backlink profiles of up to 5 of your competitors.

You are able to see their referring domains–where they’ve secured backlinks and where you haven’t–allowing you to better plan your research and link building efforts. 

Read SE Ranking’s Reviews on G2

Link Building Software #3: Ahrefs - The Best Tool for New Link-Building Opportunities

As we mentioned, Ahrefs really is an industry-standard when it comes to finding link-building opportunities. 

Why We Love It

Ahrefs is one of the best link building tools out there because of how comprehensive it is. 

In fact, it does so many different things that it would take an entire book to break down every single one, so for the sake of convenience, here are some of the standout features that we most often utilize.

Best pages by links. This feature allows you to see which pages on a competitor’s site have the most backlinks. This is useful information to have when planning content. 

Backlinks by page/domain. This feature lets you see the list of sites that link to your competitors, which translates to good outreach opportunities. 

Link intersect tool. The link intersect tool shows you the websites that are linking to various competitors but not your domain/subdomains. Another great tactic for finding outreach opportunities. 

Ahrefs will show you which sites link to specific pages, where there are broken links and broken link building opportunities, any competitor’s backlinks and is an all around powerful backlink analysis tool. 

The biggest downside of Ahrefs is the price tag. It’s not cheap, and the free trial is just ok. 

Some SEOs just starting out find this tool prohibitively expensive and aren’t willing to fork over a hundred-plus dollars per month. 

Ahrefs does offer a free week-long trial where you can use a lot of the functionalities and even plan out some of your link-building strategies. 

Read Ahrefs’s Reviews on G2. 

Link Building Software #4: Hunter.io - The Best Tool For Finding Emails

Another of the top three SEO tools we covered in the intro, Hunter.io is something you likely want to use in tandem with Ahrefs.

Once you have the websites you are interested in getting links from, you need a tool like Hunter.io to reach out to them. 

Hunter.io will then scour the web for the corresponding contact information (i.e., email addresses) in just a few seconds.

You feed Hunter.io URLs, and it provides the details. 

One of the main caveats when it comes to email prospecting tools is the success rate–how reliable are the email addresses it provides?

Hunter.io is so widely used because it uses multiple sources to find accurate contact info. 

Why We Love It

Hunter.io not only verifies that the contact information it provides is accurate but provides you with its sources so that you can do your own due diligence before starting outreach campaigns. 

Once you’ve got your list, export the CSV file so that it can be used with other tools (e.g., Excel or Google Sheets). 

Read Hunter.io’s Reviews on G2. 

Link Building Software #5: Pitchbox - The Best Email Outreach Tool

Once you’ve gathered your email addresses, you need to start your email outreach. If you’ve only got a few sites on your list, you could do it manually. 

Once you start getting into the tens or possibly hundreds of email addresses, automation becomes essential.

If you’re outreaching for link opportunities, including guest posting opportunities or executing skyscraper campaigns (i.e., mass outreach), then a tool like Pitchbox is your best friend. 

Why We Love It

There are a few reasons Pitchbox makes so much sense for us: 

• Straightforward UX
• Great tutorials and customer support
• Wide range of SEO metrics per site
• Easy to respond within Pitchbox itself

Pitchbox, like Ahrefs, is not a cheap service. If you want pricing, you’ll need to reach out to the company. 

Read Pitchbox’s reviews on G2. 

Link Building Software #6: Majestic SEO - Best Alternative Data Source

A good way to conceptualize Majestic is to see it as a more backlink-focused version of Ahrefs. Whereas Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool, Majestic SEO is a backlinks specialist. 

Why We Love It

It doesn’t give you the myriad features you get with Ahrefs, but it has some link building tools and SEO metrics that Ahrefs lacks. 

One of the most useful link building tools for us is the Trust Flow score. Trust Flow is a coefficient from 0-100 acts as a proxy for quality links so that you are concentrating your efforts on good opportunities. 

Citation Flow is another way to determine if you’re getting and chasing quality links.

Citation flow is a measure of the total number of links and, taken together with Trust Flow, it’s a good way to gauge whether a website is spammy and, therefore, whether you might want to avoid getting a link from it. 

Read Majestic SEO’s reviews on G2. 

Link Building Software #7: Mailshake 

Mailshake is designed to make outreach simpler by letting you send out personalized emails en masse.

Based on the kind of response you get (perhaps no response at all), you can then customize and schedule follow-ups. 

This sort of link building tool is essential if you are doing outreach and link building at scale. 

Why We Love It

One thing we really like about Mailshake is that it provides you with a variety of ready-made templates suited for different outreach and link building strategies. These include 

• Guestposts
• PR pitches
• Link requests
• Broken links
• Content promotion

In addition to link building, Mailshake also includes a phone dialer for sales. 

It also goes over your email content and provides suggestions for better engagement and deliverability. 

Read Mailshake’s reviews on G2. 

Link Building Software #8: Buzzstream

Buzzstream is a link building tool focused on outreach. It’s very similar to Pitchbox, but it’s cheaper, though not as feature-rich. 

Use it to help scour the web for email addresses, or upload a CSV file with a list of websites you’re planning on reaching out to and do it that way. 

This is one of the best SEO tools for making contact with sites if you are looking for blog post or link opportunities. 

Why We Love It

Buzzstream is a nice, less expensive alternative to Pitchbox and it makes good use of data. It provides you with:

• The Domain Authority of each site
• How many followers a site has
• Whether a site has promoted your articles before
• Whether you or anyone on your team has already reached out to the site in the past

All of this allows you to better prioritize your outreach and ensures you don’t waste time on anyone who is unlikely to want to link to you. 

Read Buzzstream’s reviews on G2. 

Link Building Software #9: HARO

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, and it is designed to broker relationships between journalists, bloggers and expert sources.

It has become a crucial part of link building because it is a fantastic source of organic, relevant, high-authority links. 

Many of the sites using the service are very high DR, though not all will provide you with a dofollow backlink. 

Why We Love It

HARO is free to use. Simply sign up and verify your email, and you will start receiving the three daily emails sent out by the parent company, Cision. 

Tip: it’s a good idea to do some preliminary research into whether or not a site provides a dofollow backlink before sending out a pitch.

Nofollow links and branded mentions are by no means worthless, but nothing matches a dofollow link in terms of pure SEO value. 

HARO has become quite saturated over the years, as people know that it’s an amazing way to build links. To increase your odds of landing a dofollow link from a journalist or blogger on HARO, here are some tips.

Reply to a query as quickly as possible. You snooze, you lose with HARO, as a lot of journalists are not only on tight deadlines but can get hundreds of responses to a single query. 

Short and to the point is best. Even if you have a great contribution to make, the people on the query side of the email don’t have time to read 400 words. 

Make your pitch quotable. You want whatever you write to make for an attractive quote in an article. Dry, overly technical and verbose language is usually ignored. 

There are similar and alternative services to HARO out there, including 

• SourceBottle. A paid service that does essentially the same thing as HARO. 
• ResponseSource. A UK-based HARO-style platform. 
• Qwoted. More advanced than HARO, with features like in-app messaging and the ability to see the number of responses a request has. 
• Terkel. A very similar, though a simpler version of HARO. You get five free queries per profile, and then you have to pay. 

Link Building Software #10: MOZ

MOZ is another comprehensive SEO analytics tool that takes you through everything from competitor analysis to keyword research. 

We would argue that MOZ’s most high-value link-building tool is Link Explorer. This lets you see the sites that link to a particular URL or domain.

MOZ also gives you a site’s Domain Authority (DA), which is basically their equivalent proprietary metric to Ahref’s Domain Rating (DR). 

Why We Love It

You can use this info to reverse engineer your competition’s backlink profiles, including reaching out to sites that already link to your competitors and see if they’re interested in linking to you as well (or perhaps even in place of). 

MOZ also provides a very hand Spam Score, which lets you know how many of the links you’ve received are from spammy sites.

If you don’t like one or more of these links, consider asking Google to ignore them and reduce the odds you are penalized. 

Read Moz’s reviews on G2.

Link Building Software #11 (Free Link Building Tools): Google Disavow Links Tool

An important part of link building is to spend some time evaluating the links you are getting and determining whether they are actually worth having from an SEO perspective. 

There are plenty of reasons your site might attract spammy links.

The first is that, If you purchased an old domain that was used for another website, it could still have low-quality backlinks from spammy sites pointing to it. 

The second might be that one of your competitors might have sent spam links towards your site in order to manipulate Google into penalizing you. 

A third could be that you might have paid a low-quality link building agency for links that are spammy. 

And finally, you might be trying to clean up your link profile after having engaged in some black hat link building practices. 

Why We Love It

In any of the above cases, you could help yourself by asking Google to ignore the links in question.

All you have to do is to upload a CSV disavow file that contains all of the backlinks you want to be ignored using the disavow links tool. 

Keep in mind that it can take a couple of weeks for Google to oblige your link removal request. 

You first need to find out which sites are linking to you, which you can do by going into the Google Search Console and clicking Links>External Links. 

Once you’re here, you can see a file that contains all of the domains pointing to your site.

Simply choose the domains you’re interested in disavowing and then create a CSV document with the relevant URLs. 

Pro-Tip: Disavowing links is considered an advanced SEO tactic. If Google hasn’t yet determined a link is spam, and you go and remove it, you could see your ranking suffer.

Only engage in this tactic if you are confident that removing the links won’t hurt your site. 

Link Building Software 12: SEMrush

SEMrush is another comprehensive SEO tool and highly useful link building keyword research asset in the vein of Ahrefs and Moz. 

Some of its most useful advanced features with respect to building links are:

It’s a backlink analytics tool so that you can compare your backlink profile next to the competition and potentially spot new opportunities. 

It’s a link building tool that collects opportunities for your site with which you can then do outreach. 

It’s a backlink audit tool that looks at your backlink profile and indicates where there are links that could be hurting your website. 

Why We Love It

SEMrush is unique among the best link building tools out there, period, in that it is both an analytics and email outreach tool, which is really helpful if you aren’t using email software like Pitchbox or Mailshake. 

SEMrush is also a great tool for keyword research–for SEO and paid advertising. 

Read SEMrush’s reviews on G2. 

Link Building Software #13: Google Alerts

We use Google Alerts mainly to receive notifications when someone has mentioned our site, our brand or any of our employees. 

Setting it up is quite simple. You just tell Google the keywords you want to be notified of, and any time Google indexes a new page with those keywords, you receive a message. 

Why We Love It

This is one of the best link building tools for knowing when you or your brand has been mentioned so that you can then reach out to the site and ask for a backlink.

Sites are often willing to oblige, which makes Google Alerts a really useful link building tool for straightforward link prospecting. 

When someone mentions your business, Google sends you a message, but you can also set up notifications for your competitors or even an entire product or service category. 

The reason you might want to set up alerts for competitors is so that you can identify sites that may also be willing to provide you with a link.

Product alerts are a good way to highlight websites that cover your niche and discover new marketing opportunities. 

Link Building Software #14: Check My Links

This is undoubtedly one of the best ways to find broken links.

You use it to search out broken links on domains that are relevant to your business or niche and then request that the site owner replace the dead link with one from you. 

This tactic and tool can work for any type of link, but in our experience, it’s most effective when used on statistics or tools pages. 

Why We Love It

Site owners will typically link to tools if they are helpful to their audience and are often willing to replace broken links because broken links are bad for user experience. 

Statistics pages are often well-liked by site owners because they add credibility and authority to an article.

What’s more, if the existing link in an article is broken and refers to a stat, readers might be more sceptical of the statistic in question if the source page for that statistic isn’t visible. 

Check My Links is actually a Chrome extension which you add via the Chrome Store.

Once it’s installed, just click the icon anytime you’re on a page you want to review and the tool will check all the links, highlighting working links in green and broken ones in red. 

Link Building Software #15: Linkody

Linkody is another of those link building tools designed to help you keep track of where you’ve built backlinks and all of their metrics. 

It helps you keep tabs on your links–it is especially good at helping you avoid doubling up on links from the same site (less SEO value and wasted time)--breaking down important metrics such as 

• Spam score
• Link anchor text
• DA
• Page authority

Why We Love It

You can then create reports that categorize links by each of the above metrics. 

The objective of link building tools like Linkody is to get a grasp of what tactics are working and where to make adjustments. 

It also helps make sure that your link building efforts are garnering natural, relevant, high-quality links that are not increasing your spam score. 

It comes with a plethora of link building features that let you do things like find out which domains link to you, check competing sites, set up alerts that inform you when a competitor has a new link, etc.

Linkody also lets you create a disavow file that you can then upload to Google to remove harmful, spammy links. 

Read Linkody’s reviews on G2. 

Link Building Tool#16: Monitor Backlinks 

Monitor Backlinks one of several very useful, albeit somewhat one-dimensional, link building tools designed to monitor your and your competitors’ backlinks. 

It has a lot in common with many of the other link building tools on the list–e.g., competitor monitoring and link disavow.

Why We Love It

One of the reasons this is among the best link building tools of our favourite features of Monitor Backlinks as a link building agency is the Link Checker tool that lets you know when a site removes a link to your website. 

Utilizing this feature ensures you keep all the links you have paid for and also gives you the chance to reach out to the webmaster who has deleted your link and find out why.

You might have a chance to save the link if you can demonstrate that you have updated the page or done something to add more seo value for the host. 

This is also a really nice link building software for keeping tabs on your keyword ranking and measuring the success of your link building campaigns. 

It’s definitely not as feature-rich as the big boys–Ahrefs, Moz–but it’s certainly less expensive, and some link builders actually prefer it because it is simpler to use. 

Read Monitor Backlinks’ reviews on G2. 

Linking Building At Scale is Next-to-Impossible Without Link Building Tools

Once you start ramping up your link building efforts, keeping track of everything you’re doing and have done is almost not even possible without the help of the tools mentioned on the above list. 

And even then, these tools don’t do the hard work of actually thinking through and executing your strategy: that’s still up to you.

They do automate and streamline some of the most tedious and time-consuming parts of link building, which is, of course, why they are so widely used. 

If you have the budget but simply don’t have the time to do link building well, you can always hand the reins to experienced link builders. 

At dofollow.io, we provide bespoke link building that uses a range of proven tactics to build high-quality, relevant authoritative links that Google loves.

All of these tactics are designed to increase your organic traffic while building your brand. 

Contact us today to find out more about how our team of experienced link building professionals can help you scale your link building and your site’s growth. 

Get in touch with us if you are interested in finding out more about our processes and pricing. 

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