The best free way to check backlinks of your own website is the Links report in Google Search Console, followed by the Backlinks report in Bing Webmaster Tools. Both show links that the search engines have actually found, and both cost nothing once you verify your site. For competitors, free tiers of third-party link tools give you a partial view, and manual checks fill a few gaps.

This guide covers each method, what it can and cannot tell you, how to judge link quality, and how to fix broken links on your own pages.

Search Console is Google's own data about your site. The Links report shows top linking sites, top linked pages and top linking text for your verified property.

  1. Open Search Console and select your property (a Domain property covers all subdomains and both http and https).
  2. Click Links in the left menu.
  3. Under External links, open Top linked pages to see which of your URLs attract links.
  4. Open Top linking sites to see which domains link to you, then click a domain to see the pages it links to.
  5. Click Export external links at the top right to download the list as a spreadsheet.

What it is good for:

  • Confirming that a link you earned (a press mention, a supplier listing, a guest post) has been found by Google.
  • Seeing which pages on your site earn links, so you can create more content of that type.
  • Spotting unusual domains that link to you in large numbers.

What it does not do: it shows only your own verified site, it shows a sample rather than every link, and it does not give any authority score. Treat it as "links Google knows about", not as a complete list.

Bing Webmaster Tools is free and has a Backlinks section. Verify your site (you can import it from Search Console to save time), then open the Backlinks report to see referring domains, the linking pages and the anchor text used.

Two practical reasons to use both reports:

  • Bing crawls the web independently, so its list sometimes includes links that Google's sample does not show.
  • Comparing the two helps you separate real, stable links from short-lived ones that appear in only one place.

Several commercial SEO platforms offer a free account or a free lookup with limited results. They run their own crawlers, so you can look up any domain, including competitors. Limits on rows, lookups and history differ by provider and change often, so check each provider's current plan page rather than relying on a list from an article.

Keep three points in mind when you read their data:

  1. Each tool has its own index. Two tools will show different link counts for the same domain, and neither matches Google.
  2. Authority scores such as domain ratings are each vendor's own metric. Google does not use them.
  3. A free tier usually shows the strongest or newest links first, so the rest of the profile stays hidden.

These tools are useful for direction ("Who links to my competitor's pricing guide?") rather than for exact counts.

Manual checks and their limits

You can find some mentions by hand, but these methods are unreliable for counting backlinks:

  • Searching your brand name in quotes, minus your own site, for example "Sharma Interiors" -site:sharmainteriors.in, finds pages that mention you. Many will not link.
  • The link: operator is no longer a useful way to list backlinks in Google.
  • Your analytics referral report shows sites that sent visitors, which proves a link exists but misses links nobody clicked.

Use manual checks to discover unlinked mentions you can turn into links. A polite email to a Mumbai trade directory, a London local news site or a US industry blog that already mentioned you often works better than cold outreach.

Our free Backlink Checker is a quick page-level tool, not a full backlink index. When you enter a URL it:

  • Fetches that page and counts its internal links and outbound links.
  • Shows an Open PageRank value for the domain only when that integration is active on the site. Otherwise the authority field reads "Not measured".

It does not list the sites that link to you. For that, use the Search Console Links report described above. The Domain Authority Checker works the same way: it shows Open PageRank when the integration is active and otherwise labels its output as a placeholder that is not link-based, so do not base decisions on the placeholder.

Where the page-level tools help is in checking a linking page itself. Paste the URL of a page that links to you into the Outbound Link and Anchor Analyzer to see its anchors and whether your link is nofollow, or use the Link Extractor to confirm your link is still on the page.

A short list of strong, relevant links is worth more than a long list of weak ones. Check each linking page against this table.

Signal Good sign Warning sign
Relevance Same industry, city or audience as you Unrelated topics, random languages
Placement Inside the main content, near related text Footer, sidebar blogroll, comment spam
Page quality Real content, real authors, indexed in Google Thin pages, scraped text, not indexed
Anchor text Your brand, URL or a natural description Exact-match keywords repeated across many sites
Link attributes Normal link, or nofollow, sponsored, ugc used honestly Paid link without sponsored or nofollow
Traffic The page could send you real visitors Nobody would ever click it

Google's spam policies treat buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, large-scale link exchanges and automated link schemes as link spam. If you see many low-quality links you did not build, focus first on earning good ones. Avoid buying packages that promise a set number of links.

  1. Open the linking page and confirm your link is visible and clickable.
  2. Search the page URL in Google to see whether it is indexed.
  3. Run the page through the anchor analyzer to see its attributes and how many other outbound links sit beside yours.
  4. Ask whether a customer in your market would read this page. If not, do not chase similar links.

Backlinks point in; outbound links point out. Broken outbound links on your own pages send readers to error pages and make content look neglected. They are easy to fix.

  1. Run each important page through the Broken Link Checker. It requests the links on the page and flags those that return 4xx or 5xx status codes.
  2. For each dead link, check whether the content moved. Search the old page title, or look for a newer version on the same domain.
  3. Update the link to the new location, replace it with an equally good source, or remove it if nothing fits.
  4. Re-run the check to confirm the page is clean.

Do the same for internal links. If one of your own URLs changed, add a 301 redirect from the old address and update the links that pointed to it. A wider site check is part of our SEO audit checklist for 2026.

The reverse also helps you: when a site that used to link to you now points to a dead URL on your domain (a deleted product, an old blog post), redirect that URL to the closest live page so the link counts again. Compare the Links report's Top linked pages list with the "Not found (404)" reason in the Page indexing report to spot these.

Next steps

  1. Verify your site in Google Search Console and export the external links from the Links report.
  2. Verify the same site in Bing Webmaster Tools and compare its Backlinks report.
  3. Use a free third-party tier only to explore competitors, and read its numbers as estimates.
  4. Check your most valuable linking pages with the anchor analyzer and link extractor.
  5. Run your top pages through the broken link checker each month and fix dead links.