Return Link Tracking
How to Track Return Links in Link Exchange Deals
Stop over-giving in link exchanges. Track per-partner and per-project balance with a simple, honest model.
8 min read · Updated Aug 2026
Free SEO tools for link teams
Four utilities for the calculations and checks that come up most in link building work. No signup, no email gate, and no stored data on any of them.
Works now
Link Building ROI Calculator
Estimate referral traffic, equity value, and revenue from your monthly link output. Every formula is documented, including the assumptions we think are weakest.
Budget and retainer conversations
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Works now
Return Link Balance Calculator
Work out whether an exchange partner reciprocated fairly, on straight count and on authority weighted value. Includes the over-give threshold logic.
Before you publish one more link
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Reference only for now
Backlink Status Checker
Check one placement for live status, anchor match, rel attribute, and indexability. The page documents all eight checks worth running on any link.
Spot checks and partner disputes
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Reference only for now
Bulk Domain Quality Checker
Filter a prospect list on status, indexability, language, and outbound link signals. Includes the qualification framework and link network tells.
Before you spend outreach time
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Why these four
The four questions that come up weekly
We did not set out to build a tools directory. Each of these exists because it answers a question our own workflow kept asking, and each one is annoying to answer in a spreadsheet.
Is this domain worth pitching. That is the bulk domain checker, and it is the question with the worst ratio of effort to answer. Opening 50 tabs to check whether sites resolve, publish in the right language, and carry a sane number of outbound links is an hour of clicking that a machine does in seconds. Most of a raw prospect list fails those mechanical checks, so doing them first is the single biggest time saver in prospecting.
A calculator whose formula you cannot see is worse than no calculator. Every formula on these pages is documented, including the weak parts.
Is this link still live. That is the status checker. Easy for one link, arithmetically impossible for a hundred done weekly, which is the whole reason automated monitoring exists as a product category. The page documents the eight checks worth running, so it works as a specification if you would rather script it yourself, and we would genuinely rather you did that than kept guessing.
Has this partner actually reciprocated. That is the balance calculator, and it is the question people avoid because the answer is often awkward. Exchanges drift one sided through ordinary process failures rather than bad faith: you publish first because your calendar had a slot, their slot slips, and nobody decides anything. A running total fixes most of it.
Is any of this worth what we are paying. That is the ROI calculator, and it is the one to be most careful with. It produces a number, numbers are persuasive, and the assumptions underneath are rough. So the page spells out every line of the formula and names the weakest input rather than hiding the math behind a clean interface.
One thing all four have in common: the written material matters more than the widget. A calculator that returns a figure you do not understand is worse than no calculator, because now you have a number you might put in front of a client. So each page documents its formula, its assumptions, and where it misleads you.
Definition
What free link tools can and cannot do
A free link building tool answers a single question at a single point in time, with no memory. That constraint is the whole difference between the four tools on this page and the product they sit alongside. A checker tells you a link was live when you asked. It cannot tell you when the link died, who to email about it, what that partner owes you, or whether the same thing happened to nine other placements last month. Point in time answers are genuinely useful for spot checks and disputes. They are not a system of record, and treating them as one is how teams end up with inventories nobody has verified.
01
Good at
One off answers, sanity checks, settling a disagreement with a partner, and learning what to look for in the first place.
02
Bad at
Anything requiring history, scheduling, or memory: survival rate, detection speed, and per-partner accountability.
03
The honest threshold
Around 50 placements or a second client. Below that, free tools plus a spreadsheet genuinely work.
04
What you lose without history
You cannot compute link lifetime, and lifetime is the input that drives every ROI number you will ever quote.
Working without a tool
How to run link ops on a spreadsheet
Plenty of people reading this do not need software yet, so here is the version that works. It is not a stripped down demo of our product, it is what we would actually recommend to a consultant with one client and forty links.
One sheet, one row per placement. Columns for source URL, target URL, anchor text, publish date, deal type, partner contact, last checked date, and status. The two columns people leave out are last checked and deal type, and those are the two that matter most: without last checked you cannot tell verified from assumed, and without deal type you cannot tell a paid insertion from an earned mention six months later.
Then a second sheet for partners, with given count, received count, and a balance formula. Keep it separate from the placement sheet, because a partner is a relationship and a placement is an event, and mashing them together is what makes spreadsheet link tracking collapse around fifty rows.
Book a recurring calendar block for verification. Monthly is a reasonable floor. Work down the list by last checked date, oldest first, which naturally sends you to the neglected older placements rather than the recent ones you already remember. Use the status checker page as your checklist for what to look at.
The point at which this stops working is fairly predictable. Two people editing, a hundred or so placements, or a client asking a question you cannot answer in under a minute. Until then, the spreadsheet is not a compromise, it is the correct tool, and we have a free template for it in the templates section.
Columns worth having from day one
- Source URL and target URL
- Anchor text as agreed, and as published
- Publish date and last checked date
- Deal type: exchange, guest post, insertion, or paid
- Partner contact, on the row rather than in your inbox
- Status, and a one line reason when it changes
- Rel attribute, because it changes without warning
A worked routine
Using all four together
These tools chain into a workflow, alongside the free templates. Here is the order they get used in a normal month of link work.
- 1
Filter the prospect list
Run new domains through the bulk domain quality checker before anyone writes an email. Mechanical filters first, content review only on survivors, enrichment last. This is where the largest share of wasted effort gets removed.
- 2
Check the balance before agreeing terms
For any partner you have traded with before, run the balance calculator first. Knowing you are two links ahead changes how you negotiate, and knowing you are three behind should change whether you agree at all.
- 3
Verify each new placement on publication
When a link goes live, check it against what you agreed: anchor, target, rel attribute. Corrections are easy in week one and awkward in month six, so this is the highest leverage minute in the whole process.
- 4
Re-verify oldest first, monthly
Work through your inventory by last checked date. The placements you have not looked at in longest are the ones most likely to have died, which is exactly the opposite of where attention naturally goes.
- 5
Recalculate ROI quarterly with real inputs
Once you have survival data, replace the guessed lifetime in the ROI calculator with your measured figure. This is usually the moment the case for monitoring makes itself, because the gap between assumed and actual lifetime is large.
Terminology
Terms used across these tools
One place for the vocabulary, so the individual tool pages do not have to redefine everything.
- Live link
- Present in the served HTML, on a page that resolves and is indexable, pointing at the agreed target with the expected rel attribute.
- Rel attribute
- dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, or ugc. Determines whether ranking authority passes, and it changes without notice.
- Indexability
- Whether the source page can appear in a search index. A noindexed page passes no ranking value at all.
- Outbound link ratio
- External links per page relative to internal ones. The cheapest reliable tell for a page built to sell links.
- Return link
- A link owed as part of an exchange. A liability on the balance until published and verified live.
- Exchange balance
- Links received from a partner minus links given, either as a count or weighted by authority.
- Link lifetime
- How long a placement stays live and dofollow. The most leveraged and least measured input in link ROI.
- Survival rate
- Share of a cohort still live after a period. Lifetime expressed as a percentage, and the honest way to derive it.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Are these actually free, or free with a catch?
Free, no account, nothing stored. Two of them, the ROI calculator and the balance calculator, run entirely in your browser and never send your numbers anywhere. We are obviously hoping you like the way we think about link building enough to try the paid product, and that is the whole business model behind these pages.
Which tools work right now?
Both calculators are fully working. The backlink status checker and the bulk domain checker have their forms in place but the checking backend ships in the next phase, and we have said so on each page rather than letting you find out by clicking. The written reference on those two pages is complete and useful today.
Do I need to sign up for anything?
No. No email gate on any of the four tools. The templates section does ask for an email, because we send those as files, and that is a fair trade to be upfront about.
Can I use these for client work?
Yes. Put the ROI calculator output in a client deck if you want, though please carry over the caveats too, since the traffic per link assumption is a rough heuristic rather than a measurement and a client deserves to know that. See how agencies use them.
What if I need to check hundreds of links?
Then a free one at a time tool is the wrong shape and you want scheduled monitoring. The honest threshold is somewhere around 50 placements: below that, manual checks plus a spreadsheet genuinely work, and above it the arithmetic of manual verification stops adding up. See scheduled backlink monitoring.
Related
Templates and product
Templates are the other free resource. The feature pages explain what the paid product adds on top.
Free templates
Link exchange tracker, monitoring checklist, and a recovery email template.
Read moreLink exchange tracker
The spreadsheet described above, ready to copy.
Read moreBacklink monitoring
What scheduled checking adds over one at a time verification.
Read moreReturn link tracking
Automated balance across every partner and every project.
Read moreFor freelance SEOs
Where the spreadsheet stops working, with the math spelled out.
Read morePricing
What the paid plans include, and which limit binds first.
Read moreFurther reading
Reading on link building process
The guides these tools came out of, with the formulas written out in full.
Link exchange standards
Link Exchange Guidelines: Domain, Placement, Anchor, and Quality Standards
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When point in time answers stop being enough
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