Backlinks (incoming links, inbound links or external links) are links that are redirecting user to the site from another websites. Before the introduction of search engines, they were used as a tool of web navigation. Practically, these links still play a key role in the site promotion today, so their checking description is a very important.
Website’s promotion efficiency in search engines highly depends on the quality (from what kind of sites user can be redirected) and the number of backlinks. This factor remains significant in spite of the case that leading players in the search engine market, such as Google and Yahoo, permanently reduce its importance in the search results.
To analyze the efficiency of the promotion or to perform in-time measures to address bad quality links or deleting already paid links, it is very useful to know origin sites of incoming links. It will help to perform the analysis in general as well as in specific methods. That can be done by using various tools provided by search engines – Google Webmaster Tools, for instance.
How to check backlinks with Google Webmaster Tool?
- On the Webmaster Tools homepage choose the site for analysis;
- Then enter the tool panel, select Search Traffic;
- In the popup menu click on Links to Your Site.
- After that, you will able to see the following data: number of domains that have links to the site and the number of links in each domain. Click on the specified domain to see details.
Do not have an account in Webmaster Tool? Need to check backlinks on another sites (belonging to competitors, for example) to evaluate they? Probably, the most popular online service for site exploring and link checking is Ahrefs (ahrefs.com).
This service is chargeable. However, some functions are available for free (of course, with some limitations). Every visitor can check inbound links for one website once a day. To do it, type the desired URL in the field and then press Try It for Free. You will discover the number of backlinks, referred sites, links classes (dofollow/nofollow), links indexation (new and lost links) graph, the most popular link texts (also called anchors).
Thus, this service gives actual information and statistics regarding backlinks. According to Ahrefs’s restrictions for a free version, only five domains can be seen by unregistered users and maximum of ten are possible to see for registered users with free account. In a full (commercial) version of the service there are no such limitations.
So, it is very simple to check inbound links with these service tools. Nevertheless, it only the first stage. Then this data must be correctly evaluated to use it for optimization or for search engines promotion or to make complex competitors’ analysis. The recommended solution here is to involve the professional web-studio or web promo team into the process.
We are traffic generation experts
WiseSwans SEO Services has a proven track record of search engine domination. Find out how our San Diego SEO can take you to the top of Google.
