In SEO, backlinks are a lot like votes in elections. By casting your vote (aka linking out to another site), you’re showing that you trust the candidate (another site) and consider their campaign (their content) reliable.

If you want to go deeper into what backlinks are, check out our recent guide on external links and how to use them to boost your SEO.

In government, the election commission counts the Number of votes for each candidate, and the candidate with the voting majority wins. In SEO, search bots consider not only the number of votes (backlinks) but also their quality. The overwhelming majority of spoils go to the sites with the highest quality backlinks.

In this article, we’ll uncover three ways to find links to your website so you can analyze their quality and your chances of conquering the SERP.

But first, let’s clear up the terminology to make sure we’re all on the same page.

This post contains different terms that mean the same thing but are used by three different tools that we analyze: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and SE Ranking.  We separated these terms into thematic blocks:

Please note that the term ‘external link’ in this case doesn’t mean the link from your site to another site. In GSC, ‘external link’ is synonymous with ‘backlink’. 

Now that you’re aware of these important distinctions, let’s talk about how to find links to a website.

Why backlinks are important

Backlinks are a crucial ranking signal for search engines. In 2016, Google confirmed that external links, along with content, are among the most influential of Google ranking factors.

But don’t get hung up on the total number of backlinks your site has. John Mueller from Google notes that you should prioritize backlink quality rather than quantity.

John Mueller

Search Advocate at Google

I would tend not to focus on the total number of links to your site, or the total number of domain links to your website, because we look at links in a very different way. We try to understand what is relevant for a website, how much should we weigh these individual links, and the total number of links doesn’t matter at all.

Quality backlinks can help your website in several ways:

• They direct referral traffic to your pages

If your backlink is located on a popular website with a lot of traffic and meets the user’s request, there’s a good chance it will get loads of clicks.  Visitors from high-quality backlinks are way more likely to convert into leads and then into paying customers. Though this point isn’t directly related to SEO, we highly advise that you consider it to improve your business’s initiatives.

• They make your site easier to find on the Internet

Search bots and users can find your site faster when you have links to its various pages on authoritative resources. Bots need time to index new content, but backlinks help speed up this process.

• They boost your authority

Having website authority means that others are ready to “vouch” for it. Vouching, in this case, means backlinks. Each backlink tells search engines that the content in question is valuable, trustworthy, and useful. The more quality backlinks that your site has, the more authoritative it looks in the eyes of search engines.

• They increase your site’s ranking

This point is inextricably linked to the previous one. Website authority can affect a site’s position in the SERP—and for a specific query. Authoritative pages that are relevant to the user’s query tend to appear higher in search results.

Now that you’re equipped with theory, let’s move on to practice. Below are three tools that you can use to find backlinks to your site. We’ll also provide you with step-by-step instructions on finding your site’s backlinks.

Way #1: Google Search Console

You can find all the links to your site that Google sees using Google Search Console (GSC).  

If you still don’t use GSC, check out our detailed Google Search Console set up guide. It’ll show you how to add your website to it and how to correctly verify your ownership. 

Once everything is set up, go to the Links report in the sidebar.

The report is divided into two blocks:

• External links
• Internal links

Since this guide is about external links, we’ll only focus on the first block.

On the very first page of the Links report, you’ll see a table showing the total number of links you have from outside sources as well as other important tables:

• Top linked pages 
• Top linking sites
• Top linking text

Top Linked Pages table

By going to the Top Linked Pages table, you’ll see the list of pages on your website that other sites link to the most.

In detailed reports, you’ll get the list of pages (Target pages), the number of backlinks (Incoming links) leading to a particular page, and the number of domains (Linking sites) linking out to it.

The page with the highest number of incoming links will come first. You can also sort pages by the metrics described above.

You can find links to a page by using a more detailed report that opens if you click on one of the links from your list. This report will show the sites that link out to your selected page as well as the total number of links from that site.

If you want to take an even deeper look at any particular site’s details, click on it to find pages that link out to a specific URL of your site.

Top linking sites table

This is a list of external properties that link out to your site. GSC shows up to 1000 domains. Sites are presented by their root domain without any subdomains.

The list is arranged by order of the number of links; from the site with the most links to the one with the fewest. You can also sort sites by their number of target pages.

By clicking on your site of interest, you’ll see a list of all the pages it links out to. You’ll also see the total number of external links (that this site has) that lead to each target page.

Top linking text table

Here, you can see the text used in external links, which is also called the anchor text. If multiple text variations are an exact match, and are not case-sensitive, they are considered duplicates and get merged. Link texts are grouped by exact matches and are sorted by number.

You can export data from all reports (and also export the site’s latest backlinks) in the Links tab.

While Google Search Console is free and super helpful for external link search, it only gives you a general assessment of your backlink profile. 

• It only shows 1000 domains.
• It doesn’t conveniently match the linking site (or the backlinks coming from it) with anchor texts.
• It lacks important metrics like the quality of linking domains, dofollow/nofollow attributes, etc.

Way #2: Bing Webmaster Tools

Underestimating SEO for Bing isn’t a good strategy. Bing is still popular in some niches and can even drive traffic that Google can’t.

If you’ve added and verified your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT), you’ll find your website’s links (and other important metrics) in the Backlinks report. This report is available on the left sidebar and consists of three tabs:

• Backlinks for your site
• Backlinks to any site
• Disavow links

In this guide, we’ll focus on the first two. 

Backlinks For Your Site tab

This tab presents:

• The total number of referring domains
• The total number of referring pages
• Anchor texts

It is also divided into three sections:

The Bing Webmaster Tools Help Center notes that the data you see isn’t a complete backlink profile but a representative set.

Domains

This report lists the unique domains (up to 1,500) that link out to your site. It also lists the number of backlinks coming from each domain.

By clicking on a domain, you’ll get more details, namely the:

• Number of referring pages from the selected domain (1)
• List of pages that link out to your site (2)
• Link text (if one was used) (3)
• Pages on your site that are linked to (4)

BWT displays up to 10,000 backlinks per domain.

Pages

Here, you’ll see a list of pages that link out to your site (1), the link text used (2), and the target page on your site that’s linked to (3).

You can see the data for up to 100,000 URLs.

Anchor Texts

This report shows anchor texts that other websites use to link out to yours and the number of backlinks that include each anchor text from the list. You can see referring pages by clicking on the anchor texts in the list.

BWT displays up to 1500 anchor texts that you can export. It also displays up to 10,000 referring pages.

Backlinks To Any Site tab

This is a new feature announced back in 2020. You can use it to compare the backlinks of sites similar to yours.

You can add up to two competitor sites. Compare your site with theirs to find any backlink overlaps and gaps.

The Overview section displays the total number of referring domains (and the most commonly used anchor texts) by each site.

The Total referring domains section shows each site’s top 10 source domains alongside their backlinks count.

To get a deeper analysis, go to view a detailed report. Here you’ll get a complete backlink overview of the specified competitor along with their anchor texts and target URLs.

For a more convenient comparative analysis, use one of these three filters:

• Show all data
• Show only common domains
• Show domains not linking to my site

As a free instrument, the Bing Webmaster Tools is quite helpful when you need to check a website’s backlinks, but you only get a surface level check from it. Just like Google Search Console, BWT limits you in terms of the number of accessible domains, backlinks, URLs, and anchors. It also doesn’t provide quality indicators. 

Bing, however, has one pretty significant advantage. With it, you can compare your backlink profile with those of your competitors. But it still isn’t enough for deep backlink analysis.

Way #3: SE Ranking

SE Ranking has many professional SEO tools for website audits, competitor analyses, keyword research, and of course, backlink monitoring and checking. Backlink Checker is the go-to assistant for working with backlinks. Using this backlink finder, you can get a complete view of your backlink profile and measure each and every backlink that links to your site using various parameters.

By saying “each and every,” we aren’t exaggerating. SE Ranking has one of the most extensive link bases: 

• 3T backlinks indexed 
• 262M domains indexed 
• 7B pages crawled daily

The Backlink Checker’s overview report provides a lot of useful information about your backlink profile, including:

• Domain Trust: aggregated domain quality score developed by SE Ranking. This metric provides insights into the site’s backlink profile quality and makes it easy to compare them.
• Page Trust: aggregated page quality score developed by SE Ranking. This metric’s calculation methodology is similar to the Domain Trust estimation, but instead each URL is measured separately.
• Anchor texts: the most common anchor texts used in your backlinks.
• Dofollow/nofollow backlinks: the ratio between dofollow and nofollow backlinks.
• Referring domains: the total number of referring domains, including those linking out only to the homepage or to pages within the site. This metric also looks at how your referring domains changed over a week/month/3 months/6 months/one year.
• Total backlinks: the total number of backlinks, including links to the home page and other pages, and how they changed over a week/month/3 months/6 months/one year.
• Referring .edu and .gov domains: the total number of backlinks from .edu and .gov domains.
• IP addresses and subnets: the total number of unique IPs and subnets linking out to your website.
• New & lost referring domains: the history of acquired referring domains.
• New & lost backlinks: the history of acquired backlinks.
• Backlink profile distribution map: the domain zones and countries your website gets backlinks from. It’s especially useful if, for instance, you have a local domain like co.uk

You can also use SE Ranking’s Backlink Gap Analyzer to compare you and your competitors’ backlinks. You can analyze up to five of them. We’ll cover this further in an upcoming section.

For now, let’s take a look at how to find backlinks to a website using Backlink Checker. We’ll also go over any additional data that this tool can give you. To start, go to the detailed reports in the side menu.

Referring domains

This report displays all the info about referring domains that you’ll need, including: 

• The total number of referring domains (1) 
• The total number of backlinks and IP addresses that link out to your site (2)
• Domain distribution by country code (3)

Going down a little further (4), you’ll see a list of all the domains that link out to your site, along with the domain trust score, the number of backlinks from that domain to your site, and the date SE Ranking first found that domain.

By clicking on the arrow next to a domain’s backlink count, you’ll see an expanded list with all the backlinks (and some other essential information), including:

• Domain Trust
• Page Trust
• Anchor Text
• Target URL
• Link type (dofollow/nofollow) and whether it was featured in the text on the image
• First and last seen dates

The New and Lost subreports in the sidebar will show you the domains that started linking out to you over the last week, month, 3 months, 6 months, or a year. It also shows you the referring domains you lost over that same period.

You can customize reports by choosing which columns to include and by filtering the values. You can also export reports as CSV or XLS files.

Backlinks

Traditionally, the Backlinks report starts with a short summary that presents:

• The total number of backlinks 
• The total number of IP addresses and referring domains linking out to the analyzed domain/URL
• The distribution of dofollow/nofollow backlinks

The table below shows a list of all backlinks and detailed information about them, including the:

• Link to the page containing the backlink
• Domain Trust
• Page Trust
• Backlink anchor text
• Target URL
• Backlink type
• First seen date
• Last analyzed date

You can get additional data by clicking on the arrow next to the backlink or target URL.

Just like in the Referring Domains report, you can analyze new and lost backlinks. You can also customize and export reports.

It only takes one click to export all backlinks (found by the Backlink Checker) to the Backlink Monitoring Tool. Do this to keep your finger on the pulse (or status) of your backlinks and promptly respond to any problems.