backlink-guard

中文

Find the pages your searchers already land on, check a link source before you submit your site to it, check the link after it goes live, look at your own backlink profile for the patterns Google calls link spam, and find the links that point at pages of yours that are gone.

Most backlink tools help you send more. This one tells you where not to send, and when to slow down.

Quick start

pip install "git+https://github.com/zhuyansen/backlink-guard"
backlink-guard vet mcpservers.org turbo0.com navi.tools producthunt.com clawhomepage.com

Python 3.10 or newer, no dependencies; uvx --from git+https://github.com/zhuyansen/backlink-guard backlink-guard vet … runs it without installing. With no key it reads the sites' own pages, for free (--free asks for just that). The two keys add rating, visits, Google's index and spam scores: about $0.17 for one site and $0.46 for thirty, so check the sites you are considering in one run.

Checked with both keys on 2026-10-13 and 14:

Action is what to do with the site: skip, look first, free only, low value or submit. It reads three answers that are also shown apart. Link policy: what a link there would mean under Google's link spam policies, one finding being enough; mcpservers.org sells followed links, so list there for free and never pay. Value: what a listing can bring, which is the site's reach, or none when nobody can reach it (dead, parked, dropped by Google, a shortener, a network page). The verdict weighs every finding: one avoid finding makes avoid, and caution takes two caution findings. Risk is 3 for each avoid finding and 1 for each caution. A site its own pages put at avoid, like navi.tools, gets no paid check.

Every finding comes with the text or the numbers it was read from:

turbo0.com — ⚠️ A high rating with almost no visitors: the rating comes from links, not readers. rating 81, about 2,218 visits a month. ⚠️ It asks for a link or badge back as a condition. "Free $0 … Backlink to our site is required." (Google: Excessive link exchanges, or requiring a link as part of an arrangement)

Sites that share a page template or an analytics or ads account, with each other or with sites from an earlier check on the same machine, are flagged as one operator's. When most of them have something else against them and the shared spam-link list lacks them, the report ends with a link to a filled-in report for that list; nothing is sent until you submit it.

How well it works

The rules were chosen on 100 sites they had never seen (2026-10-16): 40 that Ahrefs marks SPAM and 60 it does not.

• Every normal-labelled site called avoid does not load or has no pages in Google.
• Of 16 sites around shared checkout links, all 10 network or hacked sites come out skip, and 5 of the 6 that merely cite those products come out submit.
• What a listing brings follows reach: on two sites' analytics, 2 of 37 and 1 of 73 referring domains rated low had sent a visit, against 10 of 14 and 2 of 7 rated high.
• The ten well-known directories and communities all come out submit.

Nine tests, with their data and what each changed: docs/validation.md.

Where to be: find

A link is first a way in for visitors. A page that ranks for your keyword already gets the people looking for what you make, so a mention there is the most relevant link there is.

python -m backlink_guard find "claude skills" "claude code skills" "agent skills" --site agentskillshub.top

Three keywords, 30 results each: $0.027 on 2026-10-14. Visitors are monthly searches times the share of clicks a position usually gets, a size and not a count. --vet then vets the directories and article sites it found; pages on GitHub, Medium, YouTube or Reddit are judged by the page and its author, not the platform.

Why

Google's spam updates came in March, June, August and September 2026. "Buying or selling links", "excessive link exchanges", "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" and "using automated programs or services to create links to your site" are all on Google's list of link spam. Directory lists passed around for link building go stale fast and say nothing about any of this.

A verdict here is a set of signals a person can check. It is not Google's judgment: nobody outside Google can tell whether one link is counted, ignored or held against a site. Google ignores most junk links. What the tool is good for is not wasting effort on dead, empty or link-selling sites, and not building the pattern yourself.

What it checks

For your own domain (audit): totals and how many referring domains pass ranking credit (GoAnyAPI), new and lost referring domains by week, up to 1,000 of your backlinks one by one with the referring domains behind each anchor, the site-wide links (AIsa), and the spam score of the sites linking to you. lost reads the same backlinks for the pages of yours they point at that are gone.

Your own links: audit and lost

A count of links says little on its own: a site that puts your link in its footer gives you as many links as it has pages. So every count of links comes with the number of referring domains (the registrable domain: blog.a.example and a.example are one, alice.github.io and bob.github.io two). One site linking to one page of yours from 20 or more of its pages (--sitewide changes it), or from three or more with most of them in its footer, sidebar or navigation, is a site-wide link: one source wherever a share is worked out, and the report says so.

backlink-guard audit yoursite.example

• Read one by one: 60 of 1,840 links from 21 referring domains (AIsa); 40 links from 1 site, counted once

ℹ️ Some sites link to you from many of their pages (site-wide): each counts as one source. 40 links from 40 pages of news.example to /blog/old-launch-notes, 100% in its footer, sidebar or navigation. Each site counted once in the shares here (Google: Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites)

lost asks each page of yours that gets links whether it is still there: one GET each, redirects followed, four at a time, at most 200 pages, the most linked first. Only 404 and 410 make a page dead, also at the end of a redirect chain; any other error is reported apart, as refused or unanswered, never as dead. For each dead page it suggests where to send it: the live page in your own sitemaps (robots.txt or /sitemap.xml, indexes followed, up to 10 files and 50,000 pages) whose path is closest, with the match from 0 to 1, and no suggestion under 0.50.

backlink-guard lost yoursite.example

ℹ️ Sites link to pages of yours that no longer exist: the links reach nothing. 3 pages of yours answer 404 or 410 and have links from 12 referring domains … (Google: a page that has moved for good takes a permanent server-side redirect, 301 or 308)

Sorted by referring domains, a site-wide source counted once in Links. Nothing is redirected: it is a list to read, and a page with no good match may be better left a 404 or sent to a parent page you choose. Google's page on redirects is the reference.

Prices are what the calls cost on 2026-10-13 and 14. Paid answers are cached for 7 days.

A site its own pages already put at avoid (dead, parked, a URL shortener, a network template page, a link seller, links out to gambling sites) gets no paid check: the rest could only add to it. A site that does not load gets one question, its visits, since a site people visit that refuses the check is blocked, not dead. An ok whose check failed where it could have found something (rating, visits, index, backlink profile, checkout links, spam score, search history) is marked incomplete: run it again before relying on it.

Commands

backlink-guard find "<keyword>" [more ...] [--site yoursite.com] [--skip competitors.txt] [--vet] [--json]
backlink-guard vet <site> [more ...] [--from list.xlsx] [--skip yoursite.com] [--limit 30] [--topic "keyword"] [--referrals ga4.csv] [--deep] [--recent] [--free] [--fresh] [--json]
backlink-guard audit <your-domain> [--deep] [--sitewide 20] [--rows 1000] [--json]
backlink-guard lost <your-domain> [--sitewide 20] [--rows 1000] [--json]
backlink-guard verify <page-url> --to <your-domain>
backlink-guard log add <site> --kind directory --anchor "Your Brand"
backlink-guard log
backlink-guard recheck [--to <your-domain>] [--deep] [--free] [--json]

From a clone, python -m backlink_guard runs the same. Your log, the paid answers (kept 7 days) and the networks seen before are kept in ~/.backlink-guard, or in ./state when it is run from a clone that has one; BACKLINK_GUARD_STATE moves them.

• find: $0.005 a keyword and $0.012 for the search volumes; --vet adds the vet cost for the sites found. --site leaves your own site out, --skip competitors.
• vet: about $0.01 a site, plus about $0.16 for the batch (spam scores and search history), the same for one site or thirty: check the sites you are considering in one run; --topic adds a column with where each site ranks for your keyword ($0.005 a keyword); --free reads the sites only. --from reads the sites out of a list (text, Markdown, CSV, JSON or an Excel sheet, as paid backlink lists usually come); --skip leaves out your own site, competitors or what you already have (sites or a list file); --limit caps a run at 30 sites unless raised. --deep adds the site's own backlink profile ($0.024 a site) and looks for its checkout links on inner pages (about $0.05, plus $0.02 a link found); --recent asks whether Google is taking in its new pages ($0.008 a site, and slow: GoAnyAPI's search calls take 10 to 120 seconds). Use both before paying for a placement. --referrals reads your analytics export (GA4's Traffic acquisition by Session source, as CSV) and adds what each site has sent you. A check that finds one operator's sites missing from the shared spam-link list ends with a link to a filled-in report for it.
• audit: about $0.12, with --deep (full anchor distribution) about $0.16. Of that, about $0.06 is the 1,000 backlinks read one by one (--rows asks for fewer: 100 cost $0.028 on 2026-10-18). Without an AIsa key the 20 top linking pages from GoAnyAPI stand in.
• lost: the same backlinks, so nothing more after an audit of the same site in the last 7 days, else about $0.06; asking your pages and reading your sitemaps is free.
• verify: free. Verdicts are followed link, qualified link (nofollow, sponsored or ugc), redirect only (through the site's own /go/ page, also when the target is base64-encoded), not found, unreadable. Only those three rel values hold back credit; noopener and external do not. Each link also says where it sits, read from the elements around it: body text, main area, header, navigation, sidebar, footer, comments or author box. A followed link that is only in a footer, sidebar or navigation is called out: Google lists widely distributed footer, template and widget links among its link spam examples, and an editor's link in the text counts for more.
• log: your submissions in ledger.jsonl, with a warning past five a week or when one anchor is used over and over.
• recheck: the sites in your log (submitted or live) checked again and compared with the last look: a lower verdict, a new finding, and with --to a link of yours no longer found. Kept in recheck.json. A dozen sites cost a few cents; monthly is enough.

Keys

Both are optional. Without them the page checks still run, and the report says what was not checked.

• GOANYAPI_API_KEY (goanyapi.com): rating, visits, index status, your backlink summary.
• AISA_API_KEY (aisa.one), or aisa login: spam scores, weekly new and lost referring domains, anchors.

Both links are referral links: signing up through them supports this project. The tool works the same with a key from either site directly.

The two overlap on purpose. On the day of the test GoAnyAPI's search endpoints answered 502 all day; the index question went to AIsa instead and the run completed.

The rules it assumes

From submitting Agent Skills Hub to directories and lists through 2026:

1. Submit only your own project, only where it fits the list.
2. Read the contribution rules first. Some lists accept humans only.
3. One pull request per list. Never resubmit to push a queue.
4. A handful a week. A hundred directory links in a week is the pattern Google describes.
5. Vary the anchor: brand, bare URL, a plain description.
6. Never pay for a followed link. A paid placement must carry rel="sponsored" or nofollow.
7. After a listing goes live, check the link. A promise of "dofollow" is often a nofollow or a redirect.

The tool does not submit anything.

Use it from an agent

In Claude Code, as a plugin:

claude plugin marketplace add zhuyansen/backlink-guard
claude plugin install backlink-guard@backlink-guard

As a skill, for any agent that reads them:

npx skills add zhuyansen/backlink-guard

The skill walks an agent through the same order: vet, the rules, verify, audit. It runs the installed backlink-guard command, or uvx from this repository, or a clone in ~/backlink-guard, and says the cost before a paid run.

Limits

• Signals, not verdicts. A fall in visits next to a spam update is a coincidence in time until someone shows otherwise.
• A site that blocks unknown clients gives no page signals; the report says "blocked".
• Links added by script are not seen by verify.
• lost reads the strongest 1,000 backlinks at most, and a page that answers 200 for a missing page (a soft 404) looks alive to it. A suggestion matches paths, not content: read the page before you redirect to it.
• Private link sellers are invisible to it.
• Visit and rating numbers are third-party estimates.
• The search history is US Google only. A site whose readers are elsewhere can fall in the US and hold at home. A fall shows once two monthly readings agree, so an update that ended last week may not show yet.
• GoAnyAPI is a young service (first released August 2026). Treat it as an enhancement.

Thanks

• Loki Yan @loki_yan_seo, whose notes on the 2026 spam updates ("follow the timeline, then go through the spam policies one by one") set the order this tool works in.
• 饭特稀 | Fentix @fantexi997 for GoAnyAPI.

MIT.