Watch out, SEMRush and Ahrefs! Bing might eat into your market share.
That’s because Bing recently upgraded its backlink tool to show data from competitors.
The tool also offers info about unique referring domains, page-level links, and top anchor texts. And it’s all for free.
Bing Backlink Tool: Three Features
In the past the Bing backlink tool only included two features:
- All Links
- Disavow Links
Just recently, the engineers at Bing included a third feature: Similar Sites. It shows backlink info about other websites.
Don’t worry, Bing doesn’t determine on its own which sites qualify as “similar sites.” You can just enter whatever domains you want in a text field.
In other words, you can find data on non-similar sites if you’re looking for backlink inspiration.
Bing Backlink Information
So what kind of backlink data do you get? Quite a bit, actually.
For starters, you’ll see domain level backlink info. That’s useful to see what kinds of websites are linking to your competitors.
But more than that: you also get the number of links from each domain. Use that data to determine if a single domain is just throwing out backlinks to help a friend instead of linking to quality content.
Additionally, you can view a detailed report for each domain. In that report, you’ll see page-level data.
Bing also lets you visit each link so you can get more info about the referring page.
Bing Backlink Filters
The Bing backlink tool also lets you filter links so you get exactly the type of report you need.
Here are your filter options:
- Show All – Shows you the domains that link to your site, your competitor’s site, and those that don’t link to either.
- Common Domains – Shows you only the domains that link to your site and your competitor’s site.
- Not Linking to My Site – Shows you only the domains that link to your competitor’s site but not to your site.
View Competitor Anchor Texts
On the detail report, you also have the option to view anchor texts used to link to your competitor’s site.
If you’re not familiar with anchor text, it’s the actual text inside a hyperlink. Search bots use the anchor text to determine the relevance of a particular keyword or phrase to a link.
Why would you need to see anchor texts? They give you an idea of the phrases that help your competitor get a good rank. If you see several of the same anchor texts used by a competitor who’s outranking you for a particular keyword, then consider using those anchor texts yourself.
Also, you might want to optimize some of your content for keywords derived from competitor anchor texts.
Finally, the detail report for anchor texts lets you apply any one of the filters mentioned above.
Downloadable Reports
Bing won’t force you to only look at the reports via its app. You can download the reports as well.
In fact, you can download the reports in CSV format. That’s handy if you’d like to import them into other tools you’re using.
Bing Backlink Tool is Not a Holistic Picture
Unfortunately, the Bing backlink tool won’t show you all backlinks. It’s just “representative” data.
Still, that’s better than nothing.
Also, just because the tool doesn’t show all backlink data right now, that doesn’t mean that it never will. Maybe one day Bing will see that it can gain an edge over Google’s tooling and some of the third-party vendors by showing all backlink info.
In any case, Bing’s tool is superior to anything Google currently produces. That might change in the future as well, though.
Wrapping It Up
Bing now offers you a free backlink tool. And, while it’s not as robust as many of the other options on the market, it will still give you some insight into how your competitors are gaining rank in the search results.
If you haven’t yet taken a look at the Bing backlink tool, why not do so today?
