Free Backlink Checker

A backlink checker shows you every website that links to a domain or a single page, along with the anchor text each link uses, whether it passes authority, and how strong the linking site is. Paste a domain into this free backlink checker and you'll get the backlinks pointing at it, with the Ahrefs Domain Rating of every linking site printed next to each link. No account is needed for your first check of the day.

I've been auditing link profiles for more than eight years. Whether you call it a backlink checker, a backlinks checker or an SEO backlink checker, the question behind almost every check is the same: are these links helping, hurting, or doing nothing? A raw list can't answer that. What answers it is the context around each link, so this page explains how to read a backlink report as well as how to run one.

What a Backlink Checker Shows You

Every backlink checker works from a link index: a crawler visits billions of pages, records every outgoing link, and stores which page links to which. When you check backlinks for a website, the tool looks your domain up in that index and returns the pages that point to it. Google built its original ranking system, PageRank, on exactly this idea, and links are still one of the signals Google uses to judge which pages deserve to rank.

A useful report gives you more than a list of external backlinks. For each one you should see:

• The linking page: the exact URL the link sits on, so you can open it and judge it yourself.
• The target page: which of your pages the link points to. Most sites are surprised by how many links land on old or redirected URLs.
• Anchor text: the clickable words. They tell Google what the linked page is about.
• Link type: dofollow, or one of the rel values nofollow, sponsored and ugc.
• Domain Rating of the linking site: how strong the site behind the link is. Ten links from DR 70 sites are worth more than a thousand from DR 2 directories.
• First seen and status: when the link was found, and whether it's new, still live or lost.

Most free online backlink checkers stop at the list. We add the DR of every referring site because that single number is what you sort by when you're deciding which links matter. If you want Moz's view of the same linking sites, you can paste them into our domain authority checker and get DA, PA and Spam Score side by side.

How to Check Backlinks in Google for Free

There's no Google backlink checker for other people's sites, but Google will show you your own backlinks. In Google Search Console, open the Links report and you'll find your top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text. It's the only backlink data that comes straight from Google, and the quickest free answer to the question "who links to my website?", so every site owner should look at it once a month.

It has real limits, though. Search Console shows a sample rather than every link, it doesn't tell you which links are nofollow, it has no authority score for the linking sites, and it can't show you a competitor at all. That's why SEOs use a backlink checker alongside it, not instead of it: Search Console tells you what Google has found, and a third party index tells you how strong those links are and what your competitors have that you don't.

One more free Google trick: searching for your brand name while excluding your own domain turns up sites that mention you. Some of those mentions already link to you, and the ones that don't are some of the easiest links you'll ever earn, because the author has already written about you.

Backlinks vs Referring Domains

This is the distinction that trips up most people reading their first backlink report. A backlink is a single link from one page to another. A referring domain is a whole website that links to you at least once. If one blog links to you from its sidebar, every one of its 3,000 pages carries that link: 3,000 backlinks, but only one referring domain.

When I compare two sites, I look at referring domains first and backlinks second. A site with 200 referring domains and 1,500 backlinks almost always has a healthier profile than one with 20 referring domains and 40,000 backlinks. Repeated links from the same site are worth finding, and our duplicate backlinks checker groups them by domain from any export.

The same logic goes one level deeper with referring IPs and Class C subnets. Fifty referring domains that all sit on one server, or one block of IP addresses, often belong to one owner. That's the fingerprint of a private blog network, and it's worth spotting before you buy a link from one of them.

Dofollow vs Nofollow Backlinks

A dofollow backlink is simply a normal link with no rel attribute holding it back. Since 2019 Google has recognised three values that mark a link as something other than an editorial vote: rel="nofollow" for links you don't vouch for, rel="sponsored" for paid and affiliate links, and rel="ugc" for links in comments and forum posts. Google now treats all three as hints rather than strict rules, which means a nofollow link can still be counted in some cases.

For practical purposes, dofollow links from relevant sites are what move rankings, so a dofollow backlink checker filter is the first thing I switch on. But don't chase a profile that's 100% dofollow. Real websites collect nofollow links from social profiles, forums, news comments and Wikipedia, and a profile without any looks engineered. A healthy mix is most of the authority coming from dofollow editorial links, with a natural layer of nofollow around it.

Types of Backlinks: Contextual, Forum, Profile and 301 Redirects

Not every backlink is placed the same way, and where a link sits matters almost as much as the site it sits on. These are the types you'll see in any backlink report:

• Contextual backlinks: a link inside the body of an article, surrounded by related text. These are the ones that move rankings, because Google reads the words around the link as well as the anchor.
• Forum backlinks: links in threads and replies. Most are nofollow or ugc, so they pass little authority, but a few genuine ones send real traffic and keep a profile looking natural.
• Profile backlinks: a link on a user profile page of a forum, social network or community site. They're easy to create, which is exactly why they carry so little weight, and thousands of them is a classic spam pattern.
• Image backlinks: an image wrapped in a link. The alt text plays the part of the anchor text.
• Directory backlinks: business listings and web directories. A handful of relevant local citations helps; hundreds of generic directories don't.
• 301 redirect backlinks: links that point to an old URL or domain which now permanently redirects to yours. Google passes most of a link's value through a 301, so they count, and they're common after a domain move or a site merger.

Our checker labels each link as an article, forum, profile, directory or image link, estimated from the linking URL, so you can filter for the kind you care about and hide likely spam in one click. Redirects are the exception: a link that reaches you through a 301 looks like any other link in most link indexes, so the quickest way to find them is to run the backlink check on your old domain as well.

Backlink Analysis: How to Read a Backlink Profile

Once you've run a backlink check, these are the questions I ask, in this order:

• Who are the top 20 referring domains? Sort by DR. If the strongest sites are relevant to the niche, the profile has a real foundation. If they're unrelated directories and link lists, it doesn't.
• Is the trend going up? Compare new and lost backlinks over the last few months; that's what backlinks monitoring really comes down to. Losing links faster than you gain them shows up in rankings later, so catch it early.
• What does the anchor text look like? A natural profile is mostly brand names, bare URLs and generic phrases, with a smaller share of keyword anchors. A wall of exact match keyword anchors is one of the oldest signals of manipulation.
• Which pages earn the links? If every link points at the homepage, nothing is helping the pages that actually need to rank.

Anchor text deserves more attention than it usually gets, because it's where link building campaigns quietly pile up risk. I went through what a safe anchor mix looks like, and how far it can drift, in our guide to anchor text and domain authority.

How to Find Spammy, Toxic and Bad Backlinks

Every site collects some junk links: scraper sites, spam directories, auto generated pages that copy content and links wholesale. Google has said for years that it simply ignores most of these. Its Penguin update has worked in real time since 2016, and its SpamBrain system, the engine behind the December 2022 link spam update, is built to neutralise spammy links rather than punish the site they point to.

So a toxic or spam backlinks checker shouldn't send you into a panic. What I look for is a pattern rather than individual bad links:

• Dozens of referring domains with DR under 5, no traffic and no real content.
• Exact match keyword anchors coming from sites in unrelated languages or niches.
• Links that appeared in one burst you didn't build.
• Linking sites with a high Moz Spam Score or a Majestic Trust Flow far below their Citation Flow.

The Trust Flow to Citation Flow gap is one of the quickest spam signals there is: CF 40 with TF 5 means plenty of links and almost none of them trusted. You can run a whole list of linking domains through our bulk Trust Flow checker to find them in one pass.

Only reach for Google's disavow tool if you've been hit with a manual action for unnatural links, or if you know paid or negative SEO links are pointing at you at scale. Google's own guidance is that most sites never need it, and I've seen more traffic lost to careless disavow files than to the spam links they were meant to fix.

How to Check Competitor Backlinks

A competitor backlink checker is where link building ideas actually come from. Run the backlink check on the site ranking just above you, switch to referring domains, sort by DR, and you have a list of sites that already link to pages like yours. Some wrote a resource roundup, some accepted a guest post, some covered a study. Each one is a link you can realistically ask for, because they've already linked to your topic once.

The fastest version is a gap check: compare the referring domains of two or three competitors and look for sites that link to all of them but not to you. Those sites have shown they link in your niche, more than once. I walk through the full spreadsheet workflow, from export to cleaned prospect list, in our free bulk backlink audit guide.

Bulk Backlink Checking for Link Prospects

A backlink checker tells you who links to a site. When you flip that around and vet a list of sites you want links from, you need a bulk check instead: hundreds of domains, one score each, in one run. That's where most link builders waste hours opening tabs one at a time.

Paste your prospect list into our bulk DR checker and you'll get Ahrefs Domain Rating, URL Rating and referring domains for every site at once. Drop anything below your DR floor, then open the rest by eye. A strong score on a site that sells links to anyone is still a bad link, and no tool can make that judgement for you.

Looking for an Ahrefs Backlink Checker Alternative?

Ahrefs runs one of the biggest link indexes on the web, and its free backlink checker is where a lot of people start. It shows the top 100 backlinks of a site, and the full list, the link history and the filters all sit behind a paid plan. That's fine for a quick look at one domain, but it's a lot of money if you only need a few reports a month.

Here you get the strongest linking sites first, one row per site so sitewide links don't fill the list, a dofollow filter, and Ahrefs Domain Rating on every row, free for your first report of the day. The link list comes from our own backlink data partner, and the score next to each linking site is Ahrefs DR, so you still see how Ahrefs rates each site. When the top 50 aren't enough, backlink credits on any paid plan open the rest page by page.

Best Free Backlink Checker? Free Tools Side by Side

The big SEO suites all offer some free backlink data, mostly as a taste of their paid plans. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz each run their own crawler and link index, and each publishes its own authority score: Domain Rating, Authority Score and Domain Authority. Ahrefs calls its tool Site Explorer, Semrush has Backlink Analytics, and Moz has Link Explorer, which replaced its old Open Site Explorer in 2018. Since they crawl differently, they'll never report exactly the same backlinks for a site, and that's normal. Here's how each free backlink checker compares if you want a website backlink checker without paying:

If you're weighing up which authority score to trust in the first place, the short answer is to use more than one. Our breakdown of DA vs DR explains why the two often disagree and what the gap tells you.