Backlinks are links from other websites to yours, and they're one of the ways search engines judge trust. Automating backlink monitoring means software watches your links and tells you when something important changes.
The short version: Monitoring is very easy to automate. Good outreach isn't.
A popular industry blog linked to your free tool for years. Then they redesigned their site and the link vanished. You only found out months later while digging into why that page slipped. A lost-link alert would have let you ask them to add it back that same week.
What backlink monitoring involves
Backlink monitoring covers tracking new links, noticing lost ones, checking the quality of the sites linking to you, and spotting sudden spikes in spammy links that might need a closer look.
What software can take off your plate
- Checking weekly for new and lost backlinks
- Alerting you when you lose a link from an important site
- Flagging sudden spikes in low-quality links
- Listing new mentions of your brand that don't include a link
- Summarizing your link growth each month
What to keep in human hands
- Deciding whether a lost link is worth chasing
- Reaching out to site owners
- Judging whether odd-looking links are a real problem
A simple first automation
A lost-link alert:
- Connect a backlink data tool to your workflow.
- Every week, pull your list of links and compare it with last week.
- Filter lost links to those from sites above a quality threshold you choose.
- Send each one to Slack with the page it used to point to.
- You decide which ones to follow up on.
Common mistakes
- Panicking about every spammy link. Search engines ignore most of them.
- Tracking the total number of links instead of quality
- Automating the follow-up emails
Where it sits in the loop
Backlink monitoring is Measure, with occasional Discover when a lost link becomes a task. See the full SEO Automation Loop for all eight stages.
How much control to give it
Monitoring can be fully automated. Anything that involves contacting people should stay human. If you're not sure, start with the software watching and suggesting, and raise its freedom only once you can check its work and undo its changes. The SEO Autonomy Dial explains each setting.
Where to go next
- Link building automation
- Ahrefs
- What SEO tasks should you automate?
- Build your own SEO automation
- Back to the beginner's guide to SEO Automation