The question is, how do I find Inbound Links to My Website? I will describe the entire process, using practical methods and free SEO tools. Finding inbound links on your website is crucial for enhancing your SEO success. Inbound links carry significant weight in SEO and continue to be a powerful SEO booster in 2026. I will share how to identify who links to your website pages, evaluate the quality of those links, and prioritize outreach.
Are you struggling to reach the top of search results? I will tell you the story of the secret more straightforwardly than you think. High-quality inbound backlinks signal to Google the relevance and authority of a site, in turn boosting ranking.
Find inbound links to gauge your current position and identify areas for improvement.
Find inbound links for your competitors as well to expose their linking tactics and uncover fresh opportunities.
You’re about to discover how—but first…
Track and Grow: How do I Find Inbound Links to my Website
SEO Backlinks, also called inbound or external links, remain one of the most important factors affecting how well a website ranks in search engines. A backlink is a link on another website that takes a person to your own site. It can be on a URL, an image, or a video. Your backlink profile comprises all mentions of you on the web.
These links are like “votes of confidence” from other websites. They tell search engines like Google that your information is useful and reliable.
Your site will rank higher in search results and attract more organic visitors if you have many high-quality backlinks. Link building is an important part of any effective SEO plan because backlinks are crucial for driving traffic and improving search rankings.
To really make the most of this powerful part of SEO, you need effective link-building tactics to identify and get fresh inbound connections.
Read Also: Spy on Backlinks Like a Boss – Backlink Watch!
Why is it important to look for and keep an eye on inbound links?
Monitor your backlinks closely. Their quantity and quality matter. They directly impact your search rankings. They affect your Domain Authority.
When high-quality, authoritative domains link to your site, it makes search engines view your site more favorably. These high-quality referring domains can significantly increase your traffic and help you rank higher in search results.
On the other hand, links from low-quality or spammy websites can hurt your site. Google’s rigorous quality guidelines strongly discourage these kinds of links, which might hurt your search rankings or even get your site banned. Google has been working on its algorithm to make these bad links less important, and a big upgrade came out in December 2022. Google made it clear that websites that used unethical link-building methods, such as buying links, would see their ranking criteria worsen.
So, it’s important to check in frequently. To keep your profile healthy, protect your Domain Authority, and get the most organic views, you need to know which linking domains are providing you with referring links.
You might be wondering, “How do I check and analyses all these important links to my site?” The answer is to use the correct tools and keep an eye on them often.
Read Also: How do You Monitoring Backlinks on Your Website to Feel Safe
How can I find links pointing to my website?
Pursue high-quality backlinks constantly. This activity is called link building. It increases your site’s visibility. It improves your search rankings. Find fresh inbound connections. Monitor your link profile.
How Strong Content Marketing Can Be
Exceptional content marketing is the best strategy for naturally building backlinks. If you consistently create content that is valuable, authoritative, and interesting, other websites will link to it as a resource. This is often the best way to get high-quality inbound links and more organic traffic over time.
Use SEO tools to find new things.
You need specialized tools to review your current profile and identify new opportunities. You may use SEO suites to:
- Find out who is linked to you right now.
- Look at your competitors’ backlink profiles to find out where they are obtaining their links from.
- Use different link-building tactics to find ways to get new backlinks.
Guest Posting & Contributor Options
Writing a guest post on a well-known site in your field is a classic way to build links. You usually get to include one or two links back to your site in exchange for the content. This not only gets you more backlinks but also puts your brand in front of new people, which means more traffic.
Read Also: 350+ Free Guest Posting Sites List [Updated and Verified in 2025]
Find and fix links that don’t work on other sites.
When prominent websites have broken pages, it’s a great chance. With the right tools, you can find external websites that link to a page that no longer exists (a 404 error). You can then contact the site owner and recommend that they replace the broken page link with a link to similar, useful information on your own site. This is a good approach to get a lot of high-quality links back to your site.
Keep an eye on mentions and turn them into backlinks.
Many sites could talk about your brand, product, or service without linking to your site. You can keep track of these remarks that don’t have web links using monitoring tools. A brief email to the site owner requesting that they add a clickable inbound link will immediately add to your backlink profile and help you move up in the rankings.
If you use these link-building tactics all the time, you may actively enhance your SEO, get powerful ranking factors, and get a lot more organic traffic and better search ranks.
Free Backlink Profile Checkers
Google Search Console is a wonderful place to start if you want to monitor your backlink profile for free. It gives you a close look at the links to your site, which can help you identify problems and ways to improve. Backlink Watch is another great application that lets you analyse backlinks for free. It has a simple user interface. It’s a terrific way to quickly check the health of your backlinks.
SEO SpyGlass is a good choice for a more in-depth examination, as it offers a limited number of free reports each month. Another tool to consider is Moz Link Explorer, which can provide useful insights into your link profile. These free backlink checkers help you keep your SEO skills sharp by monitoring your inbound links and ensuring your website has a healthy backlink profile.
1. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch may take a while for your backlinks to show up because this tool is free. You can only see the first 1,000 backlinks with this method. If you have more, you’ll need to find another way to see them.
You can’t view the tabs until the backlink search is complete. The first reports, on the other hand, include useful information such as the URL of the page linking to your site, the anchor text used, and metrics like PageRank and OBL (outbound links).
2. SEO SpyGlass
After you join for free, enter your domain URL in the search box and click “Check backlinks”. When the search is done, you’ll see a summary screen.
Now, click on “Backlinks”. The columns display the URL of each website linking to your site, the domain authority of those pages, the anchor text used, whether each link is classified as “dofollow” or “nofollow,” and the date when each link was first discovered. You can pay for more analytics if you want, but this basic information gives you a solid idea of your backlink profile.
3. Google Search Console
The “External links” column shows you things like which pages on your site have the most backlinks, which websites are linked to each page, and what anchor text those sites are using.
You can see the following by clicking on a link in the “Top linked pages” section:
- The total number of links that go to that page
- The number of different sites that link to the page
- A list of domains that point to the page
Paid Backlink Profile Checkers
Cognitive SEO is a paid tool that provides a lot of information about your backlink profile, including the quality of your links, how your anchor text is distributed, and how your competitors are doing. Ahrefs is another top choice because it has a large database of backlinks and provides extensive link analysis. It helps you find high-quality backlinks and explore ways to build links, keeping your SEO work ahead of the game.
Open Site Explorer, which is now part of Moz Analytics, is a reliable tool for checking backlinks. It provides information such as Domain Authority and Page Authority. Majestic SEO is different from other tools because it offers its own link metrics, such as Trust Flow and Citation Flow, that provide a new way to assess the quality of backlinks. BuzzSumo, SEMrush, and Muck Rack are other tools that can help you improve your site’s SEO performance by providing useful information on backlinks.
1. Cognitive SEO
Cognitive SEO has many indicators, and it’s especially helpful for sites that have been hit with a Google penalty. It lets you distinguish between good and poor links and helps you keep track of which links you’ve addressed or disavowed.
When you put your URL into the link explorer and click “search”, you will obtain a full report of all the backlinks you need to keep an eye on. The report also includes a profile authority metric that shows how many of your backlinks are good, average, or bad. You can see only the external backlinks pointing to your site by clicking on the “Referring Domains” tab.
2. Ahrefs
You have to pay for Ahrefs’ backlink checker, but you can try it out for free first.
You may start keeping track of your backlinks by signing up for a free account, entering your domain, and clicking “search”. There are many metrics and options to choose from, but for a strong backlink profile, you should focus on referring domains.
Ahrefs provides a lot of useful indicators, such as domain rank, Alexa rank, the number of backlinks, and the domains of those backlinks.
3. Moz Analytics
When you type in your domain and hit search, you’ll get important information like your site’s Domain Authority (DA), the total number of linked domains, and the total number of inbound links.
You can filter this screen by several things, such as inbound links, linking domains, anchor text, and top pages.
If you choose “Limit Results to one link per domain”, you’ll be able to see more clearly where your inbound links are coming from without having to look through many links from the same domain. Internal links on your website are vital for making sure your site is relevant, but they don’t show you what kinds of links other sites are sending to your site. The Moz Link Explorer report has columns for the URL of the linked websites, the anchor text, the Moz page authority, and the domain authority.
4. Majestic SEO
If you type your URL into Majestic’s home page, you’ll get a free “trial” of their backlink checker. The free report has important information, including the overall number of backlinks, referring domains, referring IPs, and subnets.
The backlink report provides more details on the types of links your site has, such as direct and nofollow links. Majestic also has a Trust Flow metric that shows how trustworthy your site is in different areas. You can create bespoke reports based on your backlink profile and choose the metrics you want to examine in more detail.
5. Ubersuggest
First, go to Ubersuggest and type a domain or keyword into the search box. Click “Search” after choosing your language and country combination. At this point, you don’t need to be signed in. I used the English/United States setting to look up “office decor,” for example.
When the results page loads, a pop-up will display that says you can get more benefits by making a free account, such as:
- More keyword ideas
- Tracking your rank every day
- Personalised SEO tips
6. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo lets you check backlinks for free, but you can’t see everything. You can gain unlimited access to both backlink statistics and social shares for those links by paying for a membership.
In short, the free solution should work perfectly if all you need is a list of your backlinks. But if you want to keep an eye on your backlink profile over time or get back on track after a Google penalty, a subscription membership is the way to go.
7. Semrush
We use SEMrush in-house at DTC and adore how useful it is for many different departments. SEMrush includes everything we need for keyword research, keyword analysis, and finding backlinks.
The “Backlink Analytics” section is very helpful for tracking backlinks. You may review your backlinks and compare them to those of other campaigns targeting the same audience. This tool has aided our digital PR work and ensured that our campaigns are fully optimised and ready for the world to see, one search at a time.
8. Muckrack
Muck Rack is primarily a database and outreach tool for journalists, but it has recently added backlink tracking to its suite of PR tools. Its best feature is that it does everything in one place. You can make press lists, send pitches and follow-up emails, and now you can keep an eye on both mention alerts and backlinks.
To find backlinks, just click “search,” narrow the search to articles, and write a link: [put a campaign link here]. Muckrack will provide you with the results that matter, including which journalists and websites have linked to your article. It will also show the original article among the syndicated ones by including “original” in the description. It’s crucial to keep an eye on syndicated links because they have a little bit different link equity than developed links.
How to Tell the Difference Between Dofollow and Nofollow Links
The real property of a backlink tells a search engine how to treat it. Dofollow links are links that pass “link equity” or SEO value. Links that don’t pass this value are called ‘nofollow’ links, and it’s important to know which ones they are for good SEO analysis.
How to See the Attribute of a Single Link
You can look at the webpage’s source code to see if a single link is nofollow:
- Put your mouse over the link in question.
- Right-click and choose “Inspect”. The actual menu item may differ across browsers.
- Check out the HTML code for the link. If you notice rel=”nofollow,” the link is a nofollow and does not help the linked page’s ranking.
Analyzing Link Attributes at Scale
Specialised tools like Semrush’s Backlink Analytics are quite useful for getting a full picture of the Nofollow and Dofollow distribution on your site or a competitor’s domain.
These SEO tools provide you with a detailed look at all the link qualities that point to a domain. This will help you determine how much your link profile is really worth. You can use filters to find specific link categories. For instance, you can look for active links that have the rel=”sponsored” property.
What Nofollow, Sponsored, and UGC mean
It’s vital to know that Google sees some attributes as not passing equity, which means they work as nofollow links:
- rel=”nofollow”: The first attribute that tells a site owner that they don’t vouch for the linked page.
- rel=”sponsored”: This is only for links that have been paid for, like those in sponsored articles or paid digital PR efforts. These links don’t pass link equity; therefore, they are great for checking out how a competitor is establishing bought links.
- rel=”ugc”: Used for links in user-generated content, like comments or posts on a forum.
When we talk about Nofollow links in SEO analysis, we usually mean any links that don’t pass link equity, including those with the rel=”sponsored” or rel=”ugc” attributes. It’s just as vital to understand these traits as it is to examine the descriptive anchor text used in the link.
How to Check the Quality of Your Backlinks
When Google evaluates the quality of your referring links, it uses several key indicators to determine how much SEO value they add to your site. To raise your Domain Authority and Domain Rating, you need a strong backlink profile based on these variables.
Here are the most important things Google looks at when judging the quality of a backlink:
Factor of Quality | What it Means |
| Link Equity (PageRank) | This basic Google metric looks at the link’s total worth by looking at how many and how effective links point to the referring domains themselves. |
| Importance (Relevance) | The source of the link should be related to the topic. The more closely connected the content of the connecting site, page, or even paragraph is to your site’s content, the more useful the connection is. |
| Placement of the Editorial | Links that are organically positioned in the main body of the material are of more value than links that are placed in less visible regions like sidebars, footers, or navigation menus. |
| Text for the Anchor | The text that is displayed and clickable must be natural and descriptive. Links that use generic or keyword-stuffed language are generally seen as manipulative and lose value. |
| Dofollow and Indexable | Google must be able to see and index the link. The link must be a “dofollow” link (or doesn’t have a “nofollow,” “sponsored,” or “ugc” tag), as this ensures that it passes link equity. |
| Traffic and Visibility | A good link is one that real people can see and that could bring in referral traffic and help others learn about your brand. |
| Signal E-E-A-T | The link should boost your site’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Links from well-known referring domains in your field are a big part of this. |
| Health of the Overall Link Profile | Google looks at the overall pattern of all the links that point to it. It’s better to have a steady, natural rise of high-quality links than to have sudden, big jumps in low-quality or spammy connections. |
Read Also: 200+ Free High PR Dofollow Backlinks List to Boost Traffic
Start Checking for Inbound Links
Regular backlink checks are essential. Neglect risks Google penalties. Spammy links can harm your ranking. They erase your hard work.
Prioritize your backlinks report. This saves time and money. Use Ahrefs or Moz Link Explorer. Conduct regular checks. Understand your backlink profile health.
A healthy backlink profile builds trust. It improves your search ranking. Start monitoring your backlinks now. Protect your business growth.
FAQs: How do I Find Inbound Links to my Website
- How to check inbound links on a website?
Use Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to see what links are coming to your site. These tools tell you which websites are linked to your pages. You can get this information by typing in the URL of your website.
- How can I find backlinks to my website?
Use Moz or Backlink Watch. Get detailed link reports. See every linking website. Google Search Console offers basic data.
- How do I find links to my website?
Use Ahrefs or SEMrush. Track all inbound links. List every linking site. Google Search Console provides basic data.
- How to find website internal links?
You can find internal links on your website by using tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to crawl it. These tools show you all the links that go to other pages on your site. You may also inspect the navigation and footer of your website by hand.
- Why is it important to find and monitor inbound links?
Monitor your incoming links. Understand your link profile. Find good backlinks that boost SEO. Remove harmful ones. Conduct regular checks. Maintain a healthy backlink profile.
- What are inbound links?
Backlinks, or inbound links, are links from other sites that go to your site. Search engines use these links to figure out how important and relevant your site is. The quality of these links affects your SEO rankings.
- What are inbound links, and why are they important?
Inbound links are very important since they help your website rank higher in search engines. Search engines see them as trustworthy and authoritative, which can increase their visibility. Quality inbound links also bring people to your site from other sites.
- Why is monitoring inbound links essential for SEO?
If you regularly monitor inbound links, improve SEO. It helps verify link quality, spot and remove harmful or spammy links, and maximize the value of strong backlinks to raise search rankings.
