How to Find Backlinks of a Website: A Comprehensive Guide

Analysis of backlinks is a crucial component of SEO specialists’ and website owners’ work. Its goal is to promote the website in SERPs to attract organic traffic. However, to initiate a comprehensive analysis, you first need to find backlinks, which is a challenging task to accomplish manually. To implement it in a matter of seconds, you need to know how to find backlinks of a website using special services, both paid and free. By combining different methods, you can obtain a comprehensive list of backlinks, which will make your analysis more detailed and exhaustive. 

Why Is It So Important to Find Backlinks to a Website?

Link buildings are an effective way to increase a website’s visibility on the Internet. However, obtaining backlinks without paying attention to the donor website’s domain authority is a counterproductive strategy. Similarly, the lack of backlink monitoring can work against the website, contributing not to promotion but to lowering its position in SERPs. The reason could be spammy links, placement of backlinks on Internet resources with low ratings among search engines, non-working links, etc. To filter everything that can negatively affect the website’s rating, you need to find backlink, study it, and make a decision on further placement.

You should also know how to see backlinks of a website if you are analyzing competitors. Having studied their reference profile, you can discover their SEO strategy and identify new opportunities to promote your site. When you find website backlinks, you will see that they contain a large heuristic potential that will help in building a competent SEO strategy.

3 Main Ways to Find Backlinks to a Site

Since finding backlinks is one of the basics in the work of SEO professionals, many specialized services offer this feature. However, do not rush to make a subscription to one of them if you do not know how to find backlinks for a website. You can get the necessary results even with the help of free services. Here are several tips on how to find backlinks to a site, from the simplest to the most advanced.

Using Google Search to Find Number of Backlinks

The easiest way to show backlinks on the site does not require creating an account on any SEO platform. For this task, you will use the usual Google search and its operator “site:”.

1. Enter the operator site: and URL of that website for which you want to find out backlinks in the search bar.
2. Click the search to find backlinks to a page, which were indexed by Google.

This method is simple but tedious, as you will need to search for links on each page of the site separately. Also, to exclude the results from your site in the search results, enter in the search bar the following formula: 

• site:URL of a website you are interested in — site:URL of your website.

How to Find Backlinks to My Site Using Google Search Console

To find backlinks to your site using specialized tools, you must first register on a service you’ve chosen. Even if you have your personal Google account, you still need to register to work with Google Search Console.

1. After creating the account, go to the “Links” section, which works with both outgoing and incoming links.
2. Scroll through the report to the “External Links” Section to find backlinks to your website.
3. For the convenience of processing backlinks, export them in a convenient format and continue your analysis.

How to Find Backlinks to a Website Using Specialized SEO Services

You can find backlinks to website using many popular SEO platforms such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, and others. The choice of a specific service depends on what other features you need to promote your website or analyse competitors. Let us give an example of how to find website backlinks using such a well-known SEO service as Ahrefs.

Ahref’s Backlink Checker tool is available in free mode, but its functionality is limited. If you create an account, you can use the backlinks report in the Site Explorer section to find site backlinks. The advantage of Ahrefs and other similar services is that you can find all backlinks for the domain as a whole, rather than just for a specific web page. Moreover, you can analyze the quality of backlinks, anchors, and other parameters.

Other services work according to the same algorithm. That is why you first decide which of them you want to cooperate with on a long-term basis and arrange a tariff plan.

How Often Do You Need to Search Backlinks of Website

The comprehensive analysis of backlinks is not a one-time event but rather a regular process. The optimal frequency of their monitoring is once a month. But in some cases, this procedure should be carried out more often:

1. When conducting an active advertising campaign, its effectiveness should be evaluated by analyzing backlinks. During such a campaign, analyze them about once a week.
2. If you suspect that competitors lead a dishonest game against you, find all backlinks to a website more often. This will help identify harmful or spam links and remove them.
3. If the traffic on your website has fallen sharply or Google search engines have lowered it in SERPs, find backlinks of website and check them.

Conclusions

To find all backlinks to site, you do not need any special knowledge, since modern SEO tools cope with this task in automatic mode. You can analyze both your backlinks and those of competitors even without help from professionals. Find backlinks free using Google, Google Search Console, and other services offering backlink tracking in free mode. If you need a more detailed report with numerous indicators, use specialized SEO platforms. Their reports contain detailed information, which may be helpful in optimizing your link-building task.