How to Check Your Backlinks for Free

You don't need a paid subscription to see who links to your site. The two most useful free sources are run by the search engines themselves: the Links report in Google Search Console and the backlinks report in Bing Webmaster Tools. Neither shows every link on the web, but together they give you a solid, reliable view of your link profile.

We want to be upfront: NewBacklink doesn't have a backlink checker yet. This guide shows you how to use the free official tools properly, what to look for in the data, how to spot lost links, and how to win back links that point at pages you've deleted.

Why check your backlinks at all#

Checking backlinks isn't about watching a number go up. It answers practical questions:

• Which of your pages attract links? That tells you what kind of content your audience finds worth referencing.
• Who links to you? Relevant, real sites are good news. A sudden wave of unrelated or spammy domains is worth knowing about.
• What anchor text do people use? It shows how others describe you.
• Are any links pointing at pages that no longer exist? Those are the easiest links to recover.

Method 1: Google Search Console Links report#

Google's own data is the best starting point, because it reflects links Google has actually found.

Step 1: Verify your site#

If you haven't already, add your site to Google Search Console. A domain property covers every subdomain and protocol, and you verify it by adding a TXT record to your DNS (see DNS records explained). A URL-prefix property covers a single protocol and host and offers more verification methods, such as an HTML file or meta tag.

Link data can take a while to fill in for a newly verified property, so verify early.

Step 2: Open the Links report#

In the left menu, choose Links. The page is split into two columns: external links and internal links.

Step 3: Read the external links sections#

According to Google's Links report documentation, the external section includes:

• Top linked pages: your pages sorted by how many external links they have
• Top linking sites: the domains that link to you most
• Top linking text: the most common anchor text used in links to your site

Click More under any section to open the full table. Click a row in Top linked pages to see which sites link to that specific page.

Step 4: Export the data#

Use the Export external links button at the top of the report. You can export Latest links or More sample links as a CSV file or to Google Sheets. Export regularly and keep the files. The report shows a current view, and your saved exports are how you spot changes over time.

What the report won't tell you#

Google is clear about the limits:

• It shows a sample of links, not a complete list.
• Tables in the interface are limited to 1,000 rows, so large sites will see truncated lists.
• Linking sites are grouped by root domain, so blog.example.com and www.example.com appear as example.com.
• It doesn't say whether a link is nofollow. To check, open the linking page and inspect the link's rel attribute.

Method 2: Bing Webmaster Tools#

Bing crawls the web independently, so its sample often includes links Google's report doesn't show, and the reverse.

1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools and add your site. If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, Bing lets you import it, which saves a step.
2. Open the Backlinks section.
3. Review the referring domains, anchor text and referring pages views.

Bing's backlinks report also lets you look at other sites and compare their backlink profiles with yours. That's useful for finding sites that link to several competitors but not to you, which are often good outreach prospects.

What to look for in the data#

Once you have exports from both tools, merge them into one spreadsheet and deduplicate by linking domain. Then work through these checks.

Your most linked pages#

List the ten pages with the most links. Usually a few patterns appear: guides, free tools, original data, or pages that define a term. Those are the formats worth producing more of.

Linking domains#

Scan the list of linking domains. For each unfamiliar domain, open it. Is it a real site with an audience? Is it relevant to what you do? To compare a batch of linking domains roughly, our Domain Authority Checker shows the NewBacklink Domain Score, our own metric built from the Common Crawl web graph. It's not Moz DA, and Google doesn't use it or any other third-party score, so use it only as a sorting aid.

Anchor text#

A natural profile is dominated by your brand name, your URL, and descriptive phrases. If you see lots of exact-match commercial phrases you never asked for, look at where they come from. Our anchor text guide explains what healthy variety looks like.

Links pointing to broken pages#

This is the most actionable check, and it gets its own section below.

Finding lost links#

A lost link is one that used to point to you and no longer does. You'll spot them by comparing an old export with a new one.

Here's a simple routine using a spreadsheet:

1. Each month, export Latest links from Search Console and save it with the date in the filename.
2. Put last month's linking URLs in column A and this month's in column B.
3. In column C, flag any URL from column A that doesn't appear in column B.
4. Open each flagged page and work out what happened.

When you open a lost link's page, it's usually one of these:

Keep in mind that a URL disappearing from a sample doesn't always mean the link is gone. The sample itself changes. Always confirm by visiting the page.

Reclaiming links that point to broken pages#

Over the years, most sites delete or rename pages. Any backlinks pointing at those old URLs now lead visitors to an error page, and their value is lost. Recovering them takes minutes.

1. In Search Console's Top linked pages, export the full list of your linked URLs.
2. Check the status of each URL. Anything returning 404 is a candidate. Our Broken Link Checker can help you spot dead URLs on your own pages as well.
3. For each dead URL, find the closest relevant live page. Not your homepage, unless the old page really was about your brand in general.
4. Add a permanent 301 redirect from the old URL to that page.
5. Test the redirect with our Redirect Checker to make sure it returns a single 301 hop, not a chain.

Here's what the redirect looks like on Apache in an .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /old-pricing-guide/ https://www.example.com/pricing/

And on nginx:

location = /old-pricing-guide/ {
    return 301 https://www.example.com/pricing/;
}

If the old page had lots of links and no good replacement exists, consider recreating an updated version of it at the original URL. For more on choosing between redirect types, see 301 vs 302 redirects.

The limits of every backlink index#

Whichever tool you use, free or paid, remember that you're looking at a sample.

• Every index is built by a crawler, and no crawler visits every page on the web. Different crawlers find different links.
• Counts won't match between tools. One tool may say 400 linking domains and another 250. Neither is wrong; they've crawled different parts of the web at different times.
• Totals change without anything happening. A tool may drop links from its index when it recrawls less often, not because the link was removed.
• Third-party scores are estimates. They're useful for comparison, not as a measure of what a search engine thinks.

The practical approach is to track trends in one tool consistently, rather than chasing exact numbers across several.

What about spammy links?#

Almost every site picks up some junk links from scraper sites and automated directories. You usually don't need to do anything about them. Google's documentation on the disavow tool says most sites won't need it, and recommends using it only if you have a manual action for unnatural links, or expect one because of a large number of spammy links you can't remove. Used incorrectly, disavowing can hurt your site.

A monthly backlink checklist#

1. Export Latest links from Google Search Console and save the file.
2. Check Bing Webmaster Tools for new referring domains.
3. Compare with last month's export and investigate lost links.
4. Check your top linked pages for any that return errors, and redirect them.
5. Note which new content earned links, and plan more like it.

Twenty minutes a month is enough to stay on top of your link profile, catch problems early, and keep the links you've already earned working for you.