We all know that backlink data is a key component of every SEO campaign. A digital marketer tracking SEO campaigns must be able to find links quickly, report on them, and audit their performance. In addition, links are one of the most important metrics, if you can’t report them quick enough, you could fall behind.
To succeed in the 2023 digital marketing landscape, you will need quality backlinks. If you want to beat your competitors, you need the fastest backlink analysis tools and the most updated database on the market along with full reporting capabilities.
To help you identify the backlinks of any website (and see how your competitors increased their SEO efforts), report and manage backlinks, Semrush has released the fastest backlink analysis checker in the market.
Semrush backlink checker is not just a rebuild, it’s completely brand new! It’s the future of dynamic backlink management with new backlinks discovered in just 24 hours.
And the good news is, you can get access to Semrush backlink audit tool for FREE… but for a limited time only.
Let’s now dig deep into this most advanced backlink analytics tool from Semrush
With a massive update to its Backlink Analytics tool lately, Semrush backlink checker has already been called as “the Fastest Backlink Checker Ever”.
The Semrush backlink checker tool has been updated. What’s new?
A new and improved version of Semrush’s backlinks database has added three times more crawlers and has more storage. By doing so, Semrush is able to discover, index, and grow its backlink database even further. The average number of crawls Semrush is doing is:
How Semrush created this massive database of backlinks?
Semrush’s engineers and data scientists invested 30,000 hours to develop the infrastructure, using 500+ servers and 1672 cups of coffee. Using this new architecture, Semrush detects and reports new links incredibly fast due to the new data collection methodology.
| 18 months of work for the whole team |
| 30,000 expert engineering hours |
| Complete migration to new architecture |
| More than 500 servers used |
| 16,128 CPU cores |
| 245 TB of memory used for operational calculations |
| 13.9 PB of space used to store database of links |
| 16, 722 cups of coffee |
How does the updated Semrush backlink database work actually?
Let’s first get a basic understanding of how the Semrush backlink database works before we dive into what else has been improved.
The Semrush crawler starts by creating a queue of URLs by which it decides which pages will be crawled.
These pages are then analyzed by Semrush’s crawlers. They save this information when their crawlers determine that a hyperlink leads from a page on a website to another on the Internet. There would then be a temporary storage, which would hold all of this data for a period of time before it is sent to the public-facing storage, which is visible to anybody using Semrush.
So, what changed with Semrush backlink analytics tool?
Semrush began by auditing the current link storage and updating of the user-facing database. Following this, they upgraded their hardware as well as the way they stored the backlink information.
Having completely rewritten this backlink checker architecture from scratch, Semrush has dramatically reduced the time it takes between the moment your site is linked to a backlink and when you see the reported backlink in Semrush.
The latest version of Semrush almost removed the temporary storage step, added 3x more crawlers, and added filters before the queue, which significantly improves the speed and efficiency of the whole process.
Exactly, how fast is the Semrush backlink database right now?
The speed of a backlink tool’s link discovery process can be boiled down to two steps:
- Discovering backlinks by crawling the web.
- Refreshing the user interface to reflect these new links.
In theory, if Semrush can proceed through steps 1 and 2 in the median time range, a new blog post could be published, a backlink received, and reported in Semrush dashboard 40 minutes after it was published.
The big question now is, which backlink checker is the fastest in the market and who sees new links first: Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz or Majestic?
In short, Semrush is fastest backlink checker in the market, and sees new links first.
To back this claim, two separate studies were conducted by Semrush among known industry leading backlink tools competitors i.e. Ahrefs, Moz and Majestic in Q1 – Q2 2021
The first part of the study was a race to see which of the backlink tools would identify a new link the fastest and most frequently. A random sample of 33,000 URLs was taken by Semrush for this test.
The second part of Semrush’s study examined how long it takes to find a new link, show it on the dashboard’s UI, and analyze how long it takes to perform the search. This second step was performed by fetching highly trafficked parts of the web via RSS feeds, where Semrush could also view the date and time an article was published.
The study based the time when it was first discovered as a backlink by Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic on the sample of 33,000 URLs provided by Common Crawl (an independent provider). The number and percentage of backlinks found at least a day ahead of the other data providers were calculated by Semrush. According to this study Semrush outperformed the competition with 36.8% of cases in finding the first new backlinks the fastest.
A second part of the study examined how quickly Semrush can discover new links. From the time you publish your new blog post until your new backlinks appear in Semrush dashboard, the whole process is lightning fast.As part of this endeavor, Semrush decided to analyze the RSS feeds of highly trafficked sites that are likely to generate new content and immediately establish backlinks. Semrush sourced 20,000 URLs from RSS feeds from around the world that were pulled from various news sites.
The next stage involved measuring how fast Semrush found links to their new content in comparison to other data providers.
Following that, they determined the median time each tool had to check and discover each new backlink.
The URLs were collected over a period of about one month until Semrush had gathered 20,000 URLs. They have calculated the time difference between when each URL was published according to the RSS feed and when Semrush first spotted the URL.
DiscoveryTime = FirstSeenTime – PublishedTime
The same process was repeated by Semrush for Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic. For each provider, URLs that weren’t seen by one of the SEO tools within 30 days after publishing were discarded.
Amazingly, when the new link was created, Semrush only took 19 minutes to display the new link!
This study excluded Moz and Majestic because they do not provide timestamps in their links. In addition to knowing the day, it is useful to know the exact time when the link appeared to have proper results. Since Moz and Majestic do not have it in their API, Semrush excluded them from this study.
In addition, they determined the percentage of times a data provider found a backlink at least one day before another, following the same timeframe that they used for the Common Crawl data sample.
Semrush takes 32.9% of the cases, very similar to what we’ve seen in the first part of the study.
Semrush is not just a backlink checker, its a complete dynamic backlink management suite
Developing and managing links must be part of a strategy if you intend to succeed at SEO. The next step is to identify your top competitors and perform a competitive analysis. You will need a method for building new links and managing those already in place.
Here’s what you can do with Semrush dynamic backlink management tool:
- Backlink Analytics: Find out a domain’s complete backlink profile and perform a competitive analysis.
- Competitors Report: Review backlink profiles of competitors.
- Backlink Gap: Compare the backlink profiles of 5 competitors to identify backlink opportunities of low-hanging fruits in your niche.
- Backlink Audit : Check your existing link profile to understand how healthy your current backlink profile is.
- Authority Score: Determine the authority and trustworthiness of any domain.
- Link Building Tool: Manage all your outreach and link building campaigns in one tool.
- Bulk Analysis: Access backlinks data for up to 200 URLs at once
Wrapping up
As SEO is very competitive, you will want to be at the forefront of this process, getting results faster and more consistently than your competitors. Semrush’s new architecture, their backlink analytics tool, and freshest database paired with five tools for backlink management make them an industry leader for businesses needing dynamic backlink management marketing solutions.