Backlinks — links from other websites pointing to yours — are one of Google's strongest trust signals. But most website owners have no idea who's linking to them, how many sites are doing it, or whether those links are helping or hurting their rankings.
The good news: you don't need an expensive tool subscription to find out. Here's how to check your backlinks for free, what the data tells you, and what to do about it.
Why Checking Your Backlinks Matters
Your backlink profile is one of the things Google looks at when deciding how much authority to assign your site. A strong, diverse backlink profile — links from many different relevant, trusted websites — signals that your site is worth ranking. A weak or suspicious one can actively hold you back, even if your content and technical SEO are solid.
Checking your backlinks regularly matters for three reasons. First, you need to know whether your link-building efforts are working. If you've been doing guest posts, directory submissions, or HARO outreach, you should be able to see those links appearing. If they're not registering, something is wrong.
Second, you may have links you didn't earn and don't want. Spammy backlinks — from link farms, foreign-language spam sites, or paid link networks — can trigger a manual penalty from Google if they accumulate enough. You can't remove them yourself, but you can tell Google to ignore them using the disavow tool. You can only do that if you know they exist.
Third, understanding what's linking to you helps you understand what's working. If a particular type of content or a specific campaign generated ten backlinks, you want to know that — so you can do more of it.
Method 1: Google Search Console (The Most Authoritative Source)
Google Search Console is the best free tool for checking your backlinks, for a simple reason: the data comes directly from Google. It shows you exactly which pages Google has discovered linking to your site and which sites are doing the linking.
If you haven't set up Search Console yet, do that first. Go to search.google.com/search-console, add your property, and verify ownership using one of the provided methods (adding a DNS record, uploading an HTML file, or using the Google Analytics connection if you have that set up). Verification typically takes a few minutes.
Once you're inside Search Console, here's where to find your backlink data:
Step 1: In the left sidebar, scroll down to find Links and click it. This takes you to the Links overview page.
Step 2: The page is split into External links and Internal links. Focus on External links — these are the backlinks from other websites. You'll see three sections: Top linked pages, Top linking sites, and Top linking text.
Step 3: Top linked pages shows which pages on your site have the most backlinks pointing to them. Your homepage will usually be at the top, but look for any content pages that appear — those are your strongest assets, the ones other sites have found worth referencing.
Step 4: Top linking sites shows the domains that link to you most frequently. Click "More" to see the full list. This is your referring domains list — the individual websites sending links to your site. Look at this carefully: are these real, relevant sites? Do you recognise them? Are there any that look unfamiliar or suspicious?
Step 5: Top linking text shows the anchor text — the actual words other sites use when they link to you. This is important data that we'll cover in more detail shortly.
One important limitation: Search Console only works for sites you've verified. You can't use it to check a competitor's backlinks. It also doesn't show every backlink — Google's index is selective, and some links may not appear. But for your own site, it's the most accurate free source available.
Method 2: Open Page Rank (Check Any Domain, No Account Needed)
Open Page Rank (openpagerank.com) is a free tool that provides domain-level authority scores based on a public, openly accessible version of PageRank data. Unlike most backlink tools, it requires no account, no email address, and no subscription. You enter a domain and get a score from 0 to 10 within seconds.
The score reflects the overall authority of the domain based on the quality and quantity of sites linking to it. A score of 0–2 is typical for new or very low-authority sites. A score of 3–5 is moderate — enough to compete for many medium-difficulty keywords. A score of 6+ puts you in solid territory, and anything above 7 indicates a genuinely well-established domain.
Where Open Page Rank is most useful is in comparison. Check your own domain, then check two or three competitors who are outranking you for keywords you care about. If they're scoring significantly higher, that gap in domain authority is likely a contributing factor to the ranking difference — and closing it means building more quality backlinks over time.
You can also check the authority of sites that link to you, or sites you're considering for guest posting. A site with an Open Page Rank of 4 or above is generally worth pursuing for a guest post. A site at 0 or 1 with no visible content is probably not.
What Your Backlink Profile Actually Tells You
Raw numbers rarely tell the full story. Here's how to interpret what you're seeing.
Referring domains vs. total backlinks. These are different numbers and referring domains is the more important one. Total backlinks counts every individual link across all pages from all sites. Referring domains counts the number of unique websites linking to you. A single site linking to you ten times counts as ten backlinks but one referring domain. Google weighs referring domains heavily — one link from ten different sites is worth far more than ten links from the same site. If your total backlink count is much higher than your referring domains, you may be heavily reliant on a small number of sources.
Anchor text distribution. Look at the Top linking text report in Search Console. A healthy anchor text profile looks diverse: your brand name, your domain name, some variation of the page topic, some generic text like "click here" or "read more," and some bare URLs. If a disproportionate share of your incoming anchor text is an exact-match keyword — say, "cheap web design London" — that's a red flag. Natural backlinks use varied anchor text. Keyword-heavy anchor text is often a sign of manufactured link building, and Google knows it.
Diversity of linking domains. Look at which types of sites are linking to you. Are they in your industry? Do they have real content and real audiences? Or are they generic directories, foreign-language sites with no relation to your topic, or content farms with hundreds of outbound links per page? Quality matters more than quantity. Ten links from genuinely relevant, trusted sites will do more for your rankings than a hundred links from sites nobody reads.
Link velocity. This one isn't directly visible in Search Console, but watch for it over time by comparing reports across months. Google expects link growth to be roughly proportional to your content output and brand activity. A sudden spike of hundreds of new links — especially if they appear overnight — looks manipulative, regardless of where they came from. Natural link building is gradual and consistent.
Red Flags to Watch For
Most backlink problems are easy to spot once you know what you're looking for.
Links from unrelated foreign-language sites. If you run a UK-based bakery and you have fifty backlinks from Russian, Chinese, or Portuguese-language sites with no connection to food or local business, those are almost certainly spam links. They may have appeared without your knowledge — this happens regularly — and while Google generally ignores them, a large volume can attract manual review.
Over-optimised anchor text. As mentioned above, if more than 20–30% of your incoming anchor text is a single exact-match keyword phrase, that's a pattern Google recognises as unnatural. This is most commonly caused by paid link building or link exchanges that tried to "optimise" the anchor text. Diversify your future link building to correct this over time.
Links from obvious link farms. A link farm is a website that exists purely to sell or exchange links — it has no real content, no real audience, and often links to hundreds or thousands of completely unrelated sites from a single page. If you see sites in your backlink profile where every page is a wall of outbound links to random businesses, those are worthless at best and harmful at worst.
Sudden drop in referring domains. If you check your backlink data month-over-month and see your referring domain count falling, links are being removed. This might be because a site did a redesign and lost some pages, or because someone is actively removing links. Worth investigating if the drop is significant.
What to do about toxic links. If you find backlinks that look genuinely harmful — spam sites, link networks, or anything that appears to have been built manipulatively — you can submit a disavow file to Google via Search Console. This tells Google to ignore specific links or entire domains when assessing your site. Use it carefully and only for clearly problematic links; disavowing legitimate links by mistake can hurt your rankings.
How to Improve Your Backlink Profile Over Time
Knowing what you have is the first step. Improving it is the longer work.
Focus on referring domains, not total links. One link from a new site you've never linked to before is more valuable than your tenth link from the same site. Prioritise outreach that reaches new domains rather than accumulating more links from the same handful of sources.
Target relevance over volume. A link from a respected blog in your exact niche — even a smaller one — outperforms a link from a high-authority general site with no connection to your topic. When you're choosing where to pursue guest posts, directory listings, or content placements, ask: would someone interested in my site plausibly also be reading this site?
Build consistently, not in bursts. A steady pace of two to five new referring domains per month looks natural and compounds over time. Trying to acquire fifty links in a single week — even legitimately — can raise flags. Plan your link building as ongoing activity, not a one-time campaign.
Let your best content work for you. Track which pages on your site have the most backlinks (your Top linked pages in Search Console). Those are your proven link magnets. Create more content in the same format or on related topics — your site has already demonstrated it can attract links for that kind of content.
Re-check every quarter. Backlink profiles change. New links appear. Old links get removed. Run through your Search Console links report and Open Page Rank score every three months and look for changes in either direction. Consistent monitoring is the only way to catch problems early and track whether your efforts are working.
See Your Current Backlink Authority Score
Checking your backlinks is one piece of the picture. Understanding how your site's authority compares to competitors — and what other factors might be holding your rankings back — requires looking at the full picture.
GoogleGain runs 100+ checks on your site including your authority score, on-page SEO, technical health, mobile performance, and content quality. It takes 30 seconds, requires no account, and gives you a prioritised list of exactly what to fix. Run it on your site and see where you actually stand.