Free lost backlink detector
You paid for the link, or spent a week earning it. Months later it's gone. The site got redesigned, the post was pruned, or an editor swapped it to nofollow. Nothing told you. Add the backlinks that matter and LinkGuard checks them every week, then emails you the week one disappears or loses its dofollow. Free, up to 25 links.
Watch up to 25 backlinks for free. We re-check each one every week and email you the week a link is removed or quietly switched to nofollow. A free account saves your list and lets us reach you. No card, takes a few seconds.
Your monitored backlinks
| Backlink page | Points to | Status | Last checked | Actions |
|---|
No links yet. Add your most important backlink above and we'll start watching it this week.
Checks run weekly. A removed link or a dofollow→nofollow change shows up here and in your email digest. New links show pending until the first check runs.
What this tool watches
You give it the backlinks worth watching. Once a week it fetches each donor page server-side and answers two questions that decide whether the link is still doing its job:
- Is the link still there? If your URL has been removed from the page, the status flips to "not found" and you get an email.
- Is it still dofollow? If an editor or a plugin added
rel="nofollow", the link stops passing authority. We compare what we find to what you said to expect and flag the change. - Did the page break? If the donor page starts returning an error or stops responding, that shows up too — a dead host is a dead link.
What it deliberately does not do on the free tier: check Google indexation, run a full JavaScript browser, or check more often than weekly. Those are real costs, and we'd rather be honest about the boundary than pretend a free tool is the whole product.
How to use it
- Create a free account (or sign in). It's needed so we can store your links and email you — there's no card.
- Add a backlink: paste the donor page URL and your target URL, and say whether you expect dofollow or nofollow.
- Leave it. We check every link once a week. You don't need to come back — a change comes to your inbox.
- Act on the alert. When a link goes missing, that's your cue to email the site owner while the post is still fresh in their mind.
Why lost backlinks are worth catching
A backlink is an asset that can vanish without anyone telling you. Sites get redesigned, thin posts get pruned in content audits, ownership changes, and a routine plugin update can add nofollow across a whole site overnight. The link you reported to a client, or counted on for a ranking, is gone, and the first you hear of it is usually a ranking drop weeks later that you then have to explain.
Recovery is easy early and hard late
The reason monitoring pays for itself is timing. A week after a link is removed, the editor remembers the post and a polite email often gets it restored. Three months later the context is gone, the relationship has cooled, and you're starting from scratch — or rebuilding the link entirely. Catching the loss while it's recent is the difference between a two-minute fix and a new outreach campaign.
Dofollow → nofollow is the quiet one
A removed link is at least obvious once you look. The switch from dofollow to nofollow is
sneakier: the link still sits on the page, still sends the odd click, and looks completely fine
to anyone glancing at it — but it has stopped passing authority. You only catch it by reading
the rel attribute, which is exactly what this checks every week so you don't have to.
What it looks like when it works
When it works, you barely notice it at all. A link drops, the next weekly check catches it, and the email reaches you while the editor still remembers the post. You reply on the same thread that placed the link, and it's often back before the loss turns into a dip in a ranking report or an awkward question from a client. That quiet save, caught in days instead of months, is the reason to watch a link instead of hoping it holds.
Free for your most important links, paid for the rest
Twenty-five links is enough to watch the ones that matter — the expensive placements, the client VIPs, the links holding up a money page. If you're running real link building at scale, you'll outgrow the free cap quickly, and that's the point: the paid LinkGuard runs the same checks daily, adds Google indexation, renders JavaScript-heavy pages with a real browser, and has no link ceiling. Start free on what you can't afford to lose.
Frequently asked questions
What does the free Lost Backlink Detector do?
You add the backlinks you care about — the page where each link sits and the URL on your site it points to. Once a week LinkGuard fetches each donor page, checks whether your link is still there, and reads its rel attribute (dofollow or nofollow). If a link disappears or quietly switches to nofollow, you get an email. It's the unglamorous job nobody does by hand: noticing when a link you paid for or earned silently goes away.
How often are my backlinks checked?
Once a week, on the free tier. That's enough to catch a removed or downgraded link within a few days without hammering anyone's server. If you need faster — daily or close to real time — that's the paid LinkGuard product. Weekly means you might learn a link was lost up to seven days after it happened.
Is it free? What's the catch?
It's free, and there's no card. The catch is the boundaries, stated plainly: up to 25 links, weekly checks, link-presence and dofollow/nofollow only (not indexation), and email alerts only. We built it as a working slice of the paid product so you can see it works before you pay for the full version. A free account is required so we can save your list and email you.
How many backlinks can I monitor for free?
Up to 25. That's a deliberate cap, not a trial that expires — your 25 links keep getting checked weekly for as long as you want. If you're tracking more than that (most link builders and agencies are), the paid LinkGuard monitors thousands of links pay-as-you-go, with no per-link subscription.
Does it check whether my backlink is indexed in Google?
No — the free tier checks whether the link is present on the page and whether it's dofollow or nofollow. It does not check whether Google has indexed the donor page, because indexation checks cost money to run and we won't burn that on a free tool. Indexation monitoring is part of the paid product. If you only need a one-off indexation check, our free Backlink Index Checker does that separately.
How will I know when a backlink is lost?
By email. When a weekly check finds that one of your links was removed, or changed from dofollow to nofollow, the change is included in your next email digest. You don't have to log in and stare at a dashboard — the whole point is that it tells you, so a lost link surfaces while you can still ask the site owner to restore it.
How is this different from the paid LinkGuard?
Same monitoring engine, smaller slice. Free gives you 25 links, weekly checks, presence and rel only, email alerts. Paid adds the things that matter at scale: daily or near-real-time checks, Google indexation monitoring, full JavaScript rendering for donor pages that need it, Slack and Telegram alerts, history and trends, and no 25-link ceiling. If the free version proves useful on your most important links, the paid version does it for all of them.
Does it work on JavaScript-heavy donor pages?
It uses a fast, lightweight fetch, which reads most real donor pages correctly. It does not run a full JavaScript browser on the free tier — that's an expensive operation we reserve for paying customers. So on a donor page that only renders its links via JavaScript, the free check may not see the link and could report it as missing. The paid product falls back to a real browser for exactly those pages.
Last updated: 2026-05-28