Real-time fetch — not a cached index

Free backlink health snapshot — verify any single backlink in 5 seconds

Paste a donor page and your target URL. We fetch the page live, find your specific link, and check whether it's dofollow, canonicalized away, or quietly dead. Sign up free to add the Google-indexation check and JS-rendered (Browserbase) checks.

No signup. No credit card. 3 free checks per hour per IP.

What this tool checks

Most backlink tools look at domain-level link profiles from a cached index. This tool does something different: it fetches the specific donor page right now and inspects the exact link pointing to your target URL. Here is every signal we analyze.

  • Donor page liveness — HTTP status of the page (200 OK, 404 Not Found, 410 Gone, redirect chain). A 4xx means your backlink is gone regardless of what any index says.
  • Specific link presence — we scan every outbound link on the page and match against your target URL exactly. No "top link for this domain" guesswork.
  • Link attributes: anchor text, rel, position — dofollow or nofollow, sponsored or UGC, body or sidebar or footer. These determine how much equity the link passes and how Google interprets its intent.
  • Donor page indexation in Google — a non-indexed donor page passes no equity. We run a live site: query to check. This field requires a free account to see.
  • Canonical hijack detection — if the donor page's canonical tag points to a different URL, the link equity flows to that canonical target, not the page your link lives on.
  • Noindex detection — a page with <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> won't be indexed by Google, meaning your backlink is invisible from an equity standpoint.
  • Target URL redirect chain — if your target URL redirects, the link passes through at least one hop before reaching your final page. We check this and flag chains longer than one hop.
  • Language and link neighborhood — donor page language and the surrounding context snippet (50 characters before and after your link) so you can spot whether the placement is topically relevant.
  • JS-rendered page detection — if the donor page requires JavaScript to render, Tier 1 fetching will not see the link. We detect this and tell you. Signing up free unlocks Browserbase JS rendering (~5 tokens per check).

How to use

  1. Paste the donor page URL. This is the page on the external site where your backlink should be. Copy it from your outreach tracker, Ahrefs, or directly from the publisher.
  2. Paste your target URL. This is the URL on your own site that the link should point to — your landing page, blog post, or homepage. We match outbound links on the donor page against this URL exactly.
  3. Read the verdict. The status panel gives you an instant HEALTHY, DEGRADED, LOST, or UNVERIFIED label with a score and a list of specific issues. For degraded or lost links, the recommendations section tells you exactly what to do next.

Why per-link health monitoring matters

If you have ever run an outreach campaign, bought a placement, or built a topical cluster of links for a client, you know that a freshly-placed backlink is not the end of the story. Links die. They die quietly, without any notification, and the SEO impact only surfaces weeks later when rankings dip.

The standard response is to run a domain-level audit in Ahrefs or Semrush every month. But those tools answer the wrong question. They tell you how many links point to your domain in their index. They do not tell you whether your specific, paid, hard-earned link is still alive right now, and whether it is still passing value.

The four most common ways backlinks silently die

  1. The donor page returns a 404 or 410. The publisher deletes or moves the article. The page no longer exists. Your link is gone. Domain-level tools will keep showing it as "active" until their crawler revisits that specific URL — which may not happen for another six weeks.
  2. The dofollow attribute flips to nofollow. Publishers sometimes do this quietly when they switch CMS, update their editorial policy, or react to an algorithm update. The link stays in the HTML, so it still shows in most tools. But the equity is gone. Only a live fetch of the specific link element reveals this.
  3. A canonical tag is added, pointing elsewhere. This is the sneakiest failure mode. The page still exists, your link is still present, and most tools show it as healthy. But a canonical tag saying "this page is a duplicate of X" tells Google to attribute the link equity to X — not the page where your link lives. We call this canonical hijacking.
  4. The publisher adds a noindex meta tag. Common after CMS migrations or when a publisher downgrades old content. The page is still crawlable, so your backlink is visible to everyone except Googlebot — which has now been told to drop the page from its index. No index, no equity flow.

Why domain-level tools miss all four failure modes

Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush operate on massive indexes they build from periodic crawls. At scale, they cannot afford to re-crawl every page every day. A popular domain may get re-crawled weekly; a smaller blog might be visited monthly or less frequently. The result is that by the time a status change appears in their index, you have already lost weeks of ranking momentum.

This tool (and LinkGuard's paid monitoring product) takes the opposite approach: fetch the page live, on demand, whenever you need to know. No index lag. No stale data.

The link neighborhood signal

Google considers not just whether a link is dofollow and from an indexed page — it also looks at what surrounds your link on the donor page. A backlink sitting inside a contextually relevant paragraph on a clean page is worth more than the same dofollow link wedged between ads and outbound links to gambling and payday loan sites.

This is why this tool shows the context snippet (50 characters before and after your link) and the total outbound link count on the donor page. A page linking out to 200+ unrelated domains is a signal worth knowing about — even if your individual link is technically dofollow and the page is indexed.

JS-rendered backlinks: invisible to most tools

A growing share of publisher sites are built on React, Vue, or Angular — frameworks that render the page content client-side in the browser rather than returning it in the HTML body. A standard HTTP GET request to these pages returns an empty shell. The actual content, including your backlink, only appears after the JavaScript runs.

Most monitoring tools use simple HTTP fetchers. They see the shell, find no outbound links, and — depending on the tool — either flag the link as missing or silently miss it entirely. This tool detects the JS-rendered signature and tells you directly. For authenticated users, we fall back to Browserbase (a real-browser fetch), which renders the JavaScript and finds your link exactly as Google's renderer would see it.

The multiplier argument: one check vs. daily monitoring

Running this tool on a single link is useful for a spot check. But if you manage an agency portfolio with 50 clients and 500 active placements, running manual spot checks is not a workflow — it is a form of structured procrastination. The right answer is automated daily monitoring that alerts you the moment any link status changes, so you can react within hours instead of weeks.

That is what LinkGuard's paid product does. The logic this tool runs — live fetch, rel detection, indexation check, canonical check, target redirect check — runs automatically on every link in your portfolio, every day, with alerts when anything changes.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if my backlink is still alive?

Paste the donor page URL and your target URL into this tool. We fetch the donor page live, scan every outbound link, and tell you whether your specific link is there, what rel attributes it carries, and whether the donor page is indexed in Google. A HEALTHY verdict means the link is present, dofollow, and everything checks out. LOST means we could not find the link on the page.

What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow?

A dofollow link has no rel="nofollow" attribute — search engines follow it and pass link equity (PageRank) to the target. A nofollow link carries rel="nofollow", telling Google not to pass equity, though Google may still crawl through it. For ranking purposes, dofollow links from authoritative indexed pages are the ones that actually move rankings.

Why does my backlink count drop in Ahrefs?

Ahrefs uses a periodic crawl-and-index model. When a donor page removes your link or switches to noindex, Ahrefs only discovers the change the next time their crawler visits that page — which can take days or weeks. Meanwhile the link appears healthy in their index. This tool checks live, so the result reflects the actual current state.

What is canonical hijacking?

Canonical hijacking happens when a donor page has a <link rel="canonical"> tag pointing to a different URL. Google treats the canonical target as the authoritative version, so link equity flows to that URL — not the page where your link lives. This is easy to miss since the page still exists and the link is still in the HTML. We detect this and flag it as a DEGRADED signal.

How can I check if Google has indexed the donor page?

Sign up free to unlock the Google indexation check. We run a live site: query against Google and report whether the donor page appears in the index. A non-indexed page passes no equity regardless of link attributes. Anonymous users see the HEALTHY/DEGRADED/LOST verdict but indexation details require a free account.

Why don't all backlink checkers show my link?

Most tools work from a cached index. If your link was placed after their last crawl, or if the donor page renders via JavaScript, most tools will not see it. This tool fetches the page live. For JS-rendered donor pages, signing up free unlocks Browserbase JS rendering (~5 tokens per check).

Should I worry about nofollow backlinks?

Not as a primary concern. Google's official position is that nofollow is a hint, not a directive — they may still follow it and count it. A nofollow from a highly authoritative trusted page still drives referral traffic and brand signals. Worry more about links from noindexed pages, canonicalized pages, or pages with a bad link neighborhood. This tool flags all three.

How can I monitor hundreds of backlinks at once?

That is exactly what LinkGuard's paid product does. You add all your backlinks, and we run the same check this tool runs — alive check, rel attributes, indexation, canonical, target redirect — automatically every day. Alerts fire the moment anything changes. Pay-as-you-go pricing, 1000 tokens free on signup, no credit card, no subscription.

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