🤖 Overview

backlink-check is a web crawler operated by BacklinkCheck.com, a SEO tool service launched in 2015 that provides backlink auditing and link profile analysis for website owners. Its primary purpose is to crawl public web pages to discover and verify inbound links (backlinks) pointing to a given domain, feeding data into the BacklinkCheck.com dashboard for users to monitor link health, anchor text distribution, and referring domains. The bot is not associated with any search engine or AI training; it strictly serves the commercial backlink analysis product offered by the company.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The bot performs sequential HTTP/HTTPS GET requests to the target domain and to external pages that link to it, typically crawling at a rate of 1–5 requests per second per domain, though this can increase to 10–15 requests per second during large-scale audits. Its IP ranges are allocated by the cloud hosting providers DigitalOcean and Linode, with documented blocks including 159.89.0.0/16 and 139.162.0.0/16 (source: BacklinkCheck.com official API documentation and WHOIS records). The crawler respects the robots.txt file’s Crawl-delay directive and will slow to the specified delay if set, but it ignores Disallow for paths explicitly needed to follow links (e.g., /links or /out) as documented in their public token-based authentication mechanism. The user-agent also supports gzip compression and follows redirects (301/302) up to 5 hops before treating the final URL as the link target.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the official BacklinkCheck.com documentation (available at backlinkcheck.com/bot-behavior), the backlink-check bot does honor Disallow directives for specific paths such as /admin, /login, and /api, but it may ignore Disallow for paths that are required to follow outbound links, as the primary function is to verify the existence of backlinks, not to index content. Web administrators can block the bot entirely by adding Disallow: / in robots.txt, which the bot will respect after a 24‑hour cache update.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; backlink-check/2.0; +https://backlinkcheck.com/bot), often accompanied by custom HTTP headers such as X-BacklinkCheck-Bot: true and Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent request interval of 200–500 milliseconds between successive requests to the same domain, a lack of JavaScript rendering, and a tendency to request the exact same URL multiple times over a 30‑day period to detect link changes. The bot also sends a From header containing the email address of the product support team.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data — including the list of linking URLs, anchor text, link location (e.g., content body vs. sidebar), and HTTP status codes — is used exclusively for the BacklinkCheck.com dashboard where paying subscribers can view backlink profiles, monitor link loss/gain trends, and export reports. No data is sold to third parties or used for AI training; the service operates on a subscription model with no advertising component, as stated in their privacy policy (backlinkcheck.com/privacy).

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because the backlink-check bot can generate hundreds of requests per minute during an audit of a high-traffic site, it is rate‑limited to prevent server overload. The recommended policy is to set a threshold of 50 requests per 10 seconds per IP, after which the bot should receive a 429 Too Many Requests response, prompting it to back off as per its own retry‑with‑delay logic documented in the API guide.

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