How to Check Backlinks on Google

Backlink quality is one of Google's top ranking factors. But, some links can cause more harm than good. Quality is more important than quantity in this case. So, it is essential to analyze the quality of your backlink profile to improve your SEO rankings. 

Learn how to check backlinks and the benefits it brings to your website by doing so.

Backlink checker tools show you who is linking to your site, allowing you to make the most of those links and build relationships with the sites that link to your page.

Considering that Google Search Console is a free tool, it's a great place to start. All you need to do to get started is create an account. 

This tool allows you to monitor and maintain your site's visibility in search results.

You can use Google Search Console to see if Google can crawl your website. Crawling is important because it allows Google to understand the context of your website and rank your page in search results according to that information.

Google Search Console can help you in fixing indexing issues that may have prevented sites from finding and linking to your page.

Google Search Console also allows you to view search traffic data on the website and see the amount of times you appear in Google search results. In the search results, you'll also see which queries generate your website.

All of this information helps you understand how other websites find and link to your content. You can see which websites link to yours and how your search engine ranking affects your links. It can assist you in understanding how your ranking affects the number of backlinks you receive for a website.

Additionally, there is no link context – you have no way of knowing the anchor text of a link and if it has features such as ‘Nofollow’. 

In order to be able to see which links are being used to your website,

• Go to Search Console
  
• Select your property > Links > External Links
  
• Select Top Linking Sites.
  

You can see the top 1000 websites linking to your site in the report. Each site also includes data on the number of linking and target pages. 

Linking Pages tells you how many of their pages link to your website, while Target Pages tells you how many web pages they link to.

You can also click on each individual web page to see which pages are linked and how many times they are linked.

You should also take a look at your external Top Linked Pages.

• Go to Search Console
  
• Select your property
  
• Links > External Links
  
• Go to the Top Linked Pages
  

Incoming links show you which pages have the most backlinks. The top target pages are sorted by Incoming Links by default. Sort by Linking Sites instead if you want to know which sites have the most links from unique websites.

Because the links are from different websites, sorting by Linking Sites will give you a little more insight. Similarly to before, clicking on a web page will show you the top linking sites to that page as well as the number of backlinks for each.

If you have a functioning website, you should have a Google Analytics account. You don't need to subscribe to any tools or download any data because all of your data is already available through Google Analytics.

You can check backlinks in Google Analytics 4 (also called referrals) in the Traffic acquisition report under Acquisition. The report can be filtered to show only referral traffic.

• Go to Reports Acquisition Traffic Acquisition in your Google Analytics account.
  
• Scroll down and type "referral" into the search bar, then hit Enter on your keyboard.
  
• Change the primary dimension from Session default channel group to Session source/medium to see all of your referrals. 
  
• Choose the primary dimension.
  
• Select Session source/medium now.
  

You can now see all of your referrals or backlinks, but there are some that may cause problems and you don’t want them in the list with the other referrals. 

To address these problematic backlinks, add them to GA4's list of unwanted referrals. 

The list should include: 

• Self-referrals
  
• Third-party payment processors
  
• Website-managed interactions
  
• Spam referral
  

Ahrefs provides a lot of data that can help you manage and get backlinks.

You can enter a website URL into their backlink checker tool to receive information about companies that link to that page. You can enter a URL from your own website or one of your competitors' websites.

When you enter the URL, you'll see a list of all the links that lead to that specific webpage. This tool also provides more details, such as the domain rating and the number of times that domain is linked to your site.

Ahrefs also displays new, broken, and lost links to a site. With new links, you can begin building a repertoire with those sites to gain more links in the future. 

When you have broken or lost links, you can work on contacting the websites that originally linked to you and regaining those links.

This tool also allows you to track backlink profiles. You'll be able to see the growth and decline of your backlinks, as well as the organic traffic to each page. With their most linked-to pages feature, Ahrefs also helps you see which pages drive the most success.

Overall, Ahrefs provides high-quality backlink data. Whether you want to look at your own or the competition's backlinks, you'll find a lot of information.

SEMrush is a great tool for analyzing website backlinks. This tool has a massive information database that is updated daily. This continuous update allows you to accurately check your company's backlink information.

This tool helps you with figuring out how to outperform your competitors in search results. You can track multiple competitor websites at the same time and learn who is linking to them.

SEMrush allows you to see links pointing to your domain as well as the quality of those links.

SEMrush allows you to see links pointing to your domain as well as the quality of those links. You can perform a thorough link analysis, which allows you to:

• Check incoming links
  
• Examine the domain authority of the links
  
• Look at the anchor text
  
• View the URLs and titles of linking pages
  
• Know where links come from (geographically)
  

This backlink checker tool assists you in determining who is linking to your site and the authority of their website. You can examine your backlinks to see if they pass link juice to your website.

Majestic is one of the web's oldest backlink checker tools. This tool has a lot to offer your company. Majestic provides plenty of great information to help you learn about your backlinks if you want to monitor your backlink portfolio.

When you visit Majestic, you enter your domain name into the search box and proceed from there. This tool provides lots of information, including details on:

• External backlinks
  
• Referring IPs
  
• Referring subnets
  
• Referring domains
  
• Backlink history
  

This information tells you who is linking to your page and how you can get more backlinks for your business. You'll learn which pages perform better and which need more effort to gain links.

Ubersuggest is a free backlink checker tool that can help businesses find who is linking to them and who is linking to competitors. If you're looking for a cost-effective tool for your business, this is an excellent option.

This tool provides you with plenty of useful information, such as:

• Domain score
  
• Page score
  
• The total number of backlinks pointing to a page.
  
• Number of Nofollow links in total
  
• Referring domains
  
• The anchor text
  
• Link type
  

You can also perform a competitive analysis with Ubersuggest. This competitive analysis assists you in identifying new link building opportunities and determining who links to competitors but not to you. It provides an excellent opportunity to improve your site's ranking in search results and obtain additional backlinks.

This tool also assists you in identifying the best link opportunities. With advanced link filtering, you can filter links by domain score, region, text, and more.

It is important to keep track of your backlinks in order to avoid Negative SEO. Negative SEO refers to any malicious practice aimed at jeopardizing a competitor's search rankings. Because of its malicious nature, this is commonly referred to as "black hat SEO."

Negative SEO's goal is to trigger a manual penalty or an algorithmic filter. Google's algorithms are constantly being updated in order to penalize websites that use low-quality, manipulative, or spammy links. Monitoring your website's backlinks is the best way to avoid Negative SEO. 

When checking your backlinks on Google, pay close attention to the 'First Seen' date. Examine the most recent link list to see if there are any periods of unusually rapid link growth. Any unusual patterns of links found on the same date indicate that the number of new links pointing to your site is unusually high and may be the result of a Negative SEO attack.

To audit your current backlinks, follow the same procedure as when monitoring new backlinks.

First you need to get your list of backlinks and then go over your backlink profile list again.

Once you have the list, you need to analyze the specifics of your links in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your backlink profile.

You consider the following features:

• Domain Rating (DR) 
  
• Referring domains 
  
• Linked Domains 
  

You should also compare Dofollow and Nofollow links. If you don't have Nofollow links or if you have too many of them, you should be a reason for concern. 

If you do not have Nofollow links, it is likely that the links were gained in an unnatural manner, and you need to do more research to identify the spammy links.

If you have too many Nofollow links, you should consider developing a new strategy to generate Dofollow links.

So, if you've identified that you have unnatural links that you'd like to remove. The first step is to try and remove links from the other site to your site. This is always the preferred method because disavowing links is an advanced feature that, if not done correctly, can have a negative impact for your website.

If this is not possible, you should remove the URLs of any unnatural links to your website. Leaving the links will have an impact on the authority and ranking of your website.

It's also important to remember that you should only disavow links if you have 15%–20% of spammy or low-quality links and if they were responsible for your penalty.

In conclusion, checking backlinks is an important part of improving a website's SEO rankings. By analyzing your website's backlink profile, you can learn about the quality of links that drive traffic to your site, build relationships with sites that link to your page, and fix indexing issues. 

Finally, analyzing backlinks can help you improve the quality of your website's backlink profile, which leads to higher SEO rankings and more organic traffic.