How to Check Your Backlinks

Why check your backlinks at all

Your backlink profile is the set of links pointing at your site from elsewhere on the web. Checking it tells you three practical things: which links you have earned, whether you are losing links that used to help you, and whether anything unusual — a spike of spammy links, an odd anchor-text pattern — needs attention. It is basic hygiene, the off-page equivalent of checking your site loads properly.

One reality frames everything below: no tool sees the entire web. Every backlink checker, including Google’s own, reports only the links its crawler has found. That is why the numbers never match between tools. Use them for direction and comparison, not as a single source of absolute truth.

Step 1: Start with Google Search Console (free)

If you own the site, Google Search Console is the first place to look, because the data comes directly from Google:

1. Open Search Console and select your property.
2. Click Links in the left menu.
3. Read External links → Top linking sites to see which domains link to you most, and Top linked pages to see what on your site attracts links.
4. Use Top linking text to review your anchor text at a glance.

Search Console will not show every link and gives limited detail, but it is authoritative and free — the ideal baseline before you pay for anything.

Step 2: Add a third-party tool for depth

Dedicated backlink tools crawl the web themselves and expose far more detail: referring domains, dofollow vs nofollow split, anchor text breakdowns, first-seen and lost dates, and their own authority estimates. The best known are Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz. Each has free-tier or trial access that is enough for a periodic check.

Remember that DR and DA shown in these tools are estimates invented by those companies, not Google metrics. We explain each in what is Domain Rating and what is Domain Authority.

Step 3: Read what you find — quality over count

A long list of links means little on its own. When you review the report, look at:

• Relevance. Is the linking page about a topic connected to yours? A relevant link on a smaller site usually beats an irrelevant link from a big one.
• Real traffic and quality. Does the linking page look genuinely visited, or is it a thin page built only to host links? Our full checklist is in how to evaluate backlink quality.
• Dofollow vs nofollow. Links that pass authority behave differently from those that do not; a healthy profile has a natural mix.
• Anchor text balance. An unnaturally high share of exact-match commercial anchors is a red flag. See the anchor text ratio guide.
• Sudden spikes. A burst of low-quality links you did not build can signal a negative SEO attempt worth watching.

Step 4: Decide what, if anything, to act on

Most reviews end with “everything looks normal,” and that is fine. When something does stand out, resist the urge to over-react:

Google is generally good at ignoring spammy links without any action from you. The disavow tool is a last resort, not routine maintenance — misusing it can remove links that were actually helping. Reserve it for clear, manual link spam you were part of, or a genuine attack, and get experienced eyes on it first. If you find good links pointing to a broken or redirected page, that is a quick win: fix or redirect the target so the authority is not wasted.

One prerequisite: verify your site

Before Google Search Console will show you anything, you have to prove you own the site by verifying it — typically by adding a DNS record, uploading an HTML file, or confirming through Google Analytics or Tag Manager. It is a one-time step and worth doing even if you never build a single link, because Search Console is also where Google reports indexing problems, manual actions, and security issues. Verify the domain-level property rather than a single URL prefix where you can, so the reports cover every version of your site (http, https, www and non-www) in one place. With that done, the Links report and everything else becomes available for free, straight from the source that actually ranks you.

Don’t forget the links you lose

Most people check backlinks to celebrate new ones, but lost links matter just as much. A link can disappear because the linking page was deleted, redesigned, or de-indexed, because an editor removed it, or because a page that used to link to you now returns a 404. Every good tool has a “lost” or “broken backlinks” view — check it. If a valuable, relevant link vanished, a polite email to the site owner sometimes restores it. If one of your own pages that attracted links has broken or moved, fixing or redirecting it recovers authority you already earned. Restoring an existing link is usually easier than building a new one, so treat your lost-links report as a recovery to-do list rather than a source of anxiety, and work through it before you spend effort chasing brand-new placements.

Reading a backlink report without drowning

Backlink reports can list thousands of rows. Focus on the columns that decide value rather than trying to read everything:

Sort by referring domain rather than raw links so that ten links from one site do not masquerade as ten endorsements — it is the number of distinct, relevant domains that tells the real story.

Check your competitors’ backlinks too

Your own profile is only half the picture. Running the same check on the sites that outrank you shows where their authority comes from and, often, where you could plausibly earn links too. Look for domains that link to several of your competitors but not yet to you — these “link gaps” are among the most realistic prospecting targets, because a site already comfortable linking within your niche is more likely to link to you. This is not about copying every link; it is about understanding the linking landscape of your topic so your own link building aims at reachable, relevant places rather than guessing.

Mistakes to avoid

• Trusting a single tool’s total. No crawler sees the whole web; treat every count as an estimate and compare trends, not absolutes.
• Chasing volume. A thousand weak links are worth less than a handful of relevant, trusted ones.
• Over-using the disavow tool. Google ignores most spam on its own; disavowing good links by mistake does real harm.
• Reacting to noise. Small daily swings are re-crawl artefacts, not emergencies.
• Ignoring anchor text. A skewed anchor profile is easy to miss and important to catch — see the anchor text ratio guide.

Turn checking into a habit

For most sites a monthly or quarterly review is plenty. Check more often right after a campaign, a PR push, or if you suspect an attack. Keep a simple log of referring domains over time so you can see the trend — steady growth in relevant links is the signal you want, far more than any single day’s number.

Checking backlinks is really the first step of a bigger loop: understand what you have, then earn more of the good kind. That “earn more” half is the whole discipline of link building, and it is what our link building guide and services like link insertions exist to do — honestly, with relevance and real placements rather than volume for its own sake. If you would rather have someone read your profile with you, an SEO audit includes a full backlink review.