LinkMiner and SiteProfiler Tutorial: Mangools' Backlink Tools

What LinkMiner and SiteProfiler are for

LinkMiner and SiteProfiler are the two Mangools tools that deal with links rather than keywords. LinkMiner lists a site's backlinks with quality metrics, a live preview of each referring page and ways to filter and save the links worth chasing. SiteProfiler works one level up: it summarizes a whole domain, with its authority, link profile, top content and competitors. This tutorial covers both, from Mangools' own pages as of 12 October 2026, and it follows the order you would actually use them in: run an analysis, read the numbers, cut the list down, check each link, then profile the domains behind it.

The two tools arrived a few months apart. LinkMiner joined the Mangools package in January 2018, and SiteProfiler followed in September 2018 as the fifth tool. Neither one crawls the web itself. The LinkMiner page cites 9.5 trillion backlinks "including both Majestic's fresh and historic index" ^[1], so Mangools licenses Majestic's data and adds its own interface and scoring on top. Majestic users will recognize the metrics. Everyone else should know that this is the source, because it shapes what the tools can and cannot find.

That framing matters more than any single feature. LinkMiner is built for finding links to replicate, not for auditing millions of them. A typical session looks at one competitor, filters to blog and forum links and saves a few dozen candidates. Cleaning up a profile of millions of links is a different job, and the plan limits further down will tell you quickly whether Mangools can keep up with it. For most bloggers it can. For large audits, it usually cannot.

Running your first LinkMiner analysis

Choose the input deliberately

Type a domain or URL and click Find backlinks. LinkMiner accepts four kinds of input: a root domain, a subdomain, an exact URL, or a path with an asterisk ^[2]. They are not interchangeable. The bare domain, the www version and the full address with https give different results, because the full address is treated as an exact URL while the bare domain covers the whole root domain. The root domain shows everything. A path with an asterisk is the precise option: running a competitor's blog folder that way shows only the links to its articles, which is often the best source of link ideas for a content site.

Start with one link per referring domain

Before you run the analysis, tick One link per referring domain. This removes site-wide and spammy repeats and shows the real breadth of a profile, so you see how many distinct sites link to the target rather than how many times one blogroll repeats itself. Once you find a referring site you like, switch to multiple links per domain to reveal the other opportunities on that same site. Two passes give better results than one. It also saves your monthly allowance, which matters on Basic.

All, new and lost links

You can switch between all links, new links and lost links. All links draw on Majestic's Fresh and Historic indexes, and lost links are backlinks that have been deleted. New links are where Mangools' own pages disagree. The 2025 LinkMiner guide says new links come from the last 30 days, while the FAQ says "New links are links which were discovered in the past 90 days." ^[3] So a link found 45 days ago counts as new under the FAQ's definition but not under the guide's, and two reports on the same site can show different new-link totals. Check the date range in the app before you compare anything.

Reading the numbers at the top

Citation Flow, Trust Flow and the counts

For the analyzed target, LinkMiner shows Citation Flow and Trust Flow on a scale from 0 to 100, plus referring IPs, referring domains and total backlinks from the Fresh index. Trust Flow measures quality, Citation Flow measures quantity, so the two only make sense together. A site with Citation Flow 40 and Trust Flow 10 has many links from weak pages. One with 30 and 28 has fewer links but more trusted ones, and that is usually the safer profile to imitate.

Why the total and the list disagree

The header total uses Majestic's Fresh index, while the list below merges Fresh and Historic to be more complete. Loading more rows can therefore show more links than the total says exist. That is expected. It is not a bug. A header of 5,000 backlinks can sit above a list that loads more than 5,000 rows, because the list adds historic links that the Fresh index no longer counts.

Cutting thousands of links down to a shortlist

What each row tells you

Each row in the backlinks table shows the source URL with its attributes: dofollow or nofollow, a deleted tag, an image tag and the referring site's language. The metrics include external links on the page, Facebook shares, Alexa Rank, the target path and the anchor text, and you can sort by any of them. Sorting by external links on the page is a quick way to separate editorial mentions from directory pages that link out hundreds of times, whose links pass little value.

Categories and filters

LinkMiner can filter backlinks by categories such as blog, Q&A, RSS feed or forum. Blog and forum links are often the easiest to replicate, so start there. Quick and advanced filters narrow the results further, for example to dofollow or nofollow links only. Combined with categories, a list of thousands shrinks to dozens. Filter before reading. Reading everything wastes hours.

Link Strength, and what it hides

Link Strength is Mangools' own score, combining Citation Flow, Trust Flow, follow attributes, referring domains and other metrics into one value. As the guide puts it, "This metric is all about saving time." Sort by it first to find the most powerful links. Then verify them. The feature page lists social signals and Alexa Rank among its inputs, so a strong score can reflect popularity rather than topical relevance. Relevance is still your call, and the preview is how you judge it.

Checking each link before you pitch

The live preview

LinkMiner previews the referring page inside the tool and highlights where the link sits. That saves opening dozens of tabs. The preview shows the referring site's title, URL and overall look, and it can open the URL in SERPChecker for 45+ metrics. It also shows context. A link inside an article paragraph usually signals an editorial choice, while one in a footer, sidebar or blogroll appears on every page and is easy to spot as low value. Body links matter most.

Favorites as a to-do list

Mark useful backlinks as favorites and they are saved into lists for later, so prospecting becomes a list rather than a memory exercise. Save links as you go, name lists by campaign and export them for outreach. When you earn a link, click the star again to remove it. Saved data can be accessed, removed or deleted at any time, which makes the favorites list work best as a running to-do list you clear as you win links.

Missing links and false deletions

Every backlink tool misses some links, because crawlers prioritize popular pages, and a link from a page with no backlinks of its own may never be found. Even Google might not index it, the FAQ notes. If an important link is missing, check it in a second tool or in Search Console's links report to see whether the gap is in LinkMiner's data or the link was never crawled. The opposite error happens too. A link marked deleted may still exist if the page changed slightly and the crawler treated it as removed. In that case the FAQ advises ignoring the DEL label. Check the live page, then decide.

Profiling a domain with SiteProfiler

Start from the root domain

SiteProfiler checks the SEO authority of any domain or URL, with metrics, backlink profile, top content and competitors. The guide recommends analyzing the root domain, because most of the metrics are domain-based, and hovering over the info icons for short definitions. Start broad. Then check key URLs. The overview shows Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority, Majestic Citation Flow and Trust Flow, Alexa Rank, referring IPs and Facebook shares, with charts for the last six months. A sudden drop in referring IPs can show a site losing a link network, which is worth checking before you copy its backlink strategy.

What the authority scores mean

Domain Authority and Page Authority are Moz metrics from 0 to 100 that predict how well a domain or page will rank relative to others, mostly based on backlinks. A local bakery with Domain Authority 20 may be one of the strongest sites in its city, while 20 would be weak in national news, so compare only direct competitors. On the Majestic side, links from trustworthy sites raise Trust Flow and questionable ones lower it. A site with high Citation Flow and low Trust Flow deserves a closer look. Often it is spam. Both guides also still list Alexa Rank, so check whether the app shows current values before relying on it.

Backlink trends and ratios

SiteProfiler charts total backlinks over the last four months with daily data, and new versus deleted backlinks over the same period, with buttons that open those backlinks in LinkMiner. Spikes reveal campaigns and drops reveal losses. A jump of thousands of new backlinks in a few days often comes from a site-wide link or a press mention, and opening them in LinkMiner shows which. Pie charts add the dofollow ratio and the active links ratio, alongside referring domains, IPs and subnets with average links per each. The guide calls referring subnets the most precise count of independent sources, which makes it the number to watch for link networks.

Top content and competitors

SiteProfiler also identifies a competitor's most popular content, which points to topics worth covering and pages worth earning links from. It suggests competitors and similar websites to benchmark against as well. Some will be irrelevant, so prune the list. Mangools suggests other places to find competitors too: SERPChecker, KWFinder during keyword research, or SERPWatcher combined with a look at the live SERP. Merge those lists, then use them as the starting point for LinkMiner and KWFinder research.

How far each plan stretches

Both tools are capped by plan, and those caps, more than any feature, decide how much link work you can do. LinkMiner counts backlink rows per month, while SiteProfiler counts lookups per day, so the two limits run on different clocks and need different habits. Basic covers one site, which is the right scale for most bloggers ^[4]:

For a blogger looking for 20 sites to pitch each month, 100,000 rows are plenty. An agency auditing several large domains can exhaust the same allowance with a single analysis. A competitor with 400,000 backlinks would use four months of Basic's rows at once, while one link per referring domain might reduce that profile to a few thousand rows. That checkbox is the main way to ration Basic.

SiteProfiler's daily cap works the same way. Twenty lookups a day is enough for a weekly competitor review, but agencies need to plan per client. Profiling five competitors for each of ten clients once a month takes 50 profiles, which fits Premium's 70 a day easily and would take three days on Basic. For the full plan prices, see our Mangools pricing guide.

Two workflows worth copying

The first is link building. Find a competitor in SiteProfiler, open its backlinks in LinkMiner with one link per domain, sort by Link Strength, preview the top 50, save the best to favorites and export them for outreach. It takes an afternoon and ends with a prospect list. On Basic it uses one SiteProfiler lookup and one LinkMiner analysis, and with one link per domain it rarely consumes more than a small share of the month's rows.

The second is an audit of your own site, and its order matters. Fix lost links before anything else, because reclaiming is cheaper than building. A lost link from a page that still exists can often be restored with one email to the site owner, while a new link of the same quality may take dozens of pitches. The steps are short:

• Run your own root domain, not a single URL.
• Check lost links first.
• Sort new links by Link Strength.
• Review sources with high Citation Flow but low Trust Flow.

Two extras sit around the main apps. The free SEO extension shows Moz and Majestic metrics and the best backlinks of the current page while you browse, with a button to continue in LinkMiner. The API page lists LinkMiner endpoints for backlink discovery, URL metrics, favorites and exports, and SiteProfiler endpoints for domain overview, audience, backlink profile, top content and competitors. Access starts with a free-account token. API pricing is not published.

Where LinkMiner fits next to Ahrefs and Semrush

Ahrefs runs its own backlink index and sells Lite at US$129 a month. LinkMiner uses Majestic's data inside every Mangools plan from US$49. Billed annually, Mangools Basic costs US$358.80 a year against US$1,290 for Ahrefs Lite, a difference of US$931.20 that pays for a lot of outreach. For heavy link work, Ahrefs is deeper. For prospecting on a budget, LinkMiner is enough. Semrush lists backlink analysis among its tools, with the SEO plan at US$139 a month, and its free plan allows 10 backlink queries a day, against 100,000 rows a month on Mangools Basic.

Mangools' own pages also differ on the size of that data, from 2.5 trillion unique URLs on the LinkMiner page to more than 2 trillion crawled URLs in the 2025 guide. Either way, it is Majestic's data. That settles who should use these tools. Bloggers and small agencies prospecting for links, checking competitors' authority and monitoring their own lost links will get real value, mostly from the preview and Link Strength. Link builders who need a first-party index, very large exports or daily link alerts should look elsewhere, and Ahrefs fits them better. Our Mangools alternatives guide covers the other options.

The bottom line

LinkMiner and SiteProfiler give a fast, readable view of backlinks and domain authority on Majestic and Moz data. The live preview and Link Strength save real time, and the favorites lists turn research into an outreach queue. Mangools is a light tool, though, so know its scope. Use it for prospecting, competitor checks and reclaiming lost links, ration Basic's rows with one link per referring domain, and move to a larger first-party index when link work becomes your main job.