Free SEO Tool
Free Backlink Checker
Check backlinks for any domain, yours or a competitor's. Referring domains, anchor text and dofollow status, shown in full with no account and nothing held back behind a sign-up.
How to check backlinks for my website
Three steps, and the domain is the only thing you need:
Enter a domain
Yours or anyone else's. Backlink data is public, so you can check a competitor's profile without any special access.
Read the summary
Total backlinks, referring domains, the dofollow against nofollow split, and how many links are broken.
Work through the links
The strongest linking domains with their anchor text and first seen date, ready to copy or download as CSV.
Using this as a competitor backlink checker
Backlink data is public, so a competitor backlink analysis needs no permission and no access to their accounts. Enter their domain instead of yours.
This is the most useful thing most people do with a tool like this. Your own profile tells you where you stand. A competitor's tells you which sites in your field link out at all, which is the part you can act on, because a site that has linked to one company in your industry is far likelier to link to another than a site that has never linked to anyone.
A practical way to find competitor backlinks worth pursuing:
- 1Run two or three competitors through the checker and note the referring domains each one has.
- 2Ignore the enormous sites. A link from a major publication is not an opportunity, it is a press story.
- 3Look for the domains that appear for more than one competitor. Those sites clearly link out to companies like yours, and they are the realistic targets.
- 4Read the anchor text and the linking page. A directory listing, a roundup post and a genuine editorial mention need completely different approaches.
- 5Check whether the link is dofollow before spending effort on it.
What a single-domain check cannot tell you is which of those domains link to your competitors but not to you. That comparison is a separate exercise, and our backlink gap tool does it directly: enter your domain plus your competitors and it removes everything already linking to you, leaving only the difference.
What the numbers actually mean
A website backlink checker gives you six numbers. Only two of them are worth reacting to, and the biggest one is the least useful.
Referring domains
How many separate sites link to you. This matters far more than the raw backlink count: fifty links from one site is one relationship, while fifty links from fifty sites is fifty.
Total backlinks
Every individual link found. It inflates fast, because a site-wide footer link on a large site can produce thousands of backlinks from a single domain.
Dofollow against nofollow
Dofollow links pass ranking signals. Nofollow links do not, at least not directly, though Google treats the attribute as a hint rather than an instruction and they still bring traffic.
Domain rank
A 0 to 1000 estimate of how strong a domain's own link profile is. Useful for comparing two linking domains against each other, not as an absolute score to optimise.
Broken backlinks
Links pointing at pages on your site that no longer resolve. These are the cheapest wins in link building: the link already exists, it just needs a working destination.
Anchor text
The clickable words in the link. It tells search engines what the destination is about, which is why an unnaturally repetitive anchor profile looks manipulative.
What makes a backlink valuable
Two links can look identical in any tool and be worth completely different amounts. These are the differences that matter.
| Factor | Worth having | Worth little |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | A link from a site in your field | A link from an unrelated directory |
| Editorial placement | Inside the body of a page, in context | In a footer, sidebar or author bio on every page |
| The linking domain | A site with its own real link profile | A site built only to host outbound links |
| Anchor text | Varied and natural, often a brand name | The same exact keyword every time |
| Traffic | A page people actually visit | A page nothing links to and nobody reads |
| How it was acquired | Earned or asked for on merit | Bought in bulk, or swapped in a network |
Toxic backlinks, and what to do about them
Usually nothing. The disavow file does more self-inflicted damage than spam links do, and most sites never need to touch it.
- 1Do not panic first. Google is far better at ignoring bad links than it used to be. Most spam links are simply discounted, and the majority of sites never need to do anything about them at all.
- 2Look for a pattern, not for individual links. One odd link means nothing. Hundreds of links appearing at once from unrelated domains with identical keyword anchors is a pattern, and that is what is worth investigating.
- 3Check whether you have a manual action. Google Search Console tells you directly under Security and Manual Actions. If there is no manual action and your rankings are stable, there is usually nothing to fix.
- 4Try removal before disavowing. If a link genuinely harms you and you can contact the site, asking for removal is cleaner than disavowing, because it removes the link rather than asking Google to look away from it.
- 5Disavow only as a last resort. The disavow file tells Google to ignore specified links. Used carelessly it removes links that were helping you, and that damage is self-inflicted and slow to undo. Use it for confirmed paid or spam links, not on suspicion.
Where a backlink checker tool fits
Checking your links is diagnosis, not treatment. Nothing in the report above earns you a link. What it does is tell you which sites in your field link out at all, which is the only reliable place to start, and it does the same for competitors.
Read the domain-level picture with the DR Checker, find what a competitor ranks for with Competitor Keywords, and if this report shows broken backlinks, trace where those links now land with the Redirect Checker. Recovering a broken link is the cheapest link you will ever build.
One note on numbers. The domain rank here runs 0 to 1000 and comes from a different index than the 0 to 100 Domain Rating in our DR Checker. They measure a similar idea on different scales, so compare each against itself rather than against the other.
Backlink checker FAQ
How to check competitor backlink?
Enter their domain in the checker above instead of your own. Backlink data comes from independent crawls of the public web, so it needs no permission, no verification and no access to anything of theirs. You get their referring domains, the anchor text used, and whether each link is dofollow, which is the same detail you get for your own site.
How can I find my competitors' backlinks?
Run each competitor through the tool above and compare the referring domain lists. The domains worth your attention are the ones appearing for more than one competitor, because a site that links to two companies in your field is demonstrably willing to link to a third. Very large sites are usually not opportunities, since a link from a major publication is a press outcome rather than an outreach one.
What is competitor backlink analysis?
Looking at which sites link to your competitors in order to understand where links in your industry actually come from, and which of those sources you could realistically earn. It is more useful than auditing your own profile alone, because your own links tell you what you already have while a competitor's tell you what is available. The practical output is a shortlist of sites that link out to companies like yours.
How to find competitors backlinks in 2026?
The method has not changed and does not need to: crawl-based tools like the one above report public link data, so you enter a competitor domain and read the results. What has changed is what to do with them. Mass outreach to every domain on the list works far less well than it did, so the value now is in spotting the handful of sources that link to several competitors and understanding why, then earning a mention on the same terms.
Is there a free way to check backlinks?
Yes. The checker at the top of this page is free, needs no account, and shows the full result rather than a preview. Google Search Console also reports links to your site for free, but only for properties you have verified, so it cannot tell you anything about a competitor.
How can I check my backlinks?
Enter your domain above. You get the total backlink count, how many separate domains those links come from, the dofollow and nofollow split, and the strongest individual links with their anchor text. For a complete picture of your own site, cross-check with the Links report in Google Search Console, since that is Google's own view.
How do I view backlinks of a website?
The same way as your own: enter the domain above. Backlink data comes from independent crawls of the public web, so no permission or verification is needed. Checking a competitor's profile is one of the more useful things you can do with a tool like this, because their links show you which sites in your field link out at all.
What is the best free backlink checker?
It depends what you need. For your own site, Google Search Console is the most authoritative source because it is Google's own data, though it is limited to verified properties. For checking any domain without an account, this tool and others like it work from third-party indexes. No index sees the entire web, so treat any single number as an estimate.
What is the best free tool for checking backlinks?
For a quick check of any domain with no sign-up, this one. If you own the site, pair it with Search Console. If you are doing serious link building at scale, the paid indexes from the large SEO vendors are larger and worth the money at that point. There is no single best tool, only a best tool for the question you are asking.
Which backlink checker is most accurate?
None of them is complete, and they disagree because each one runs its own crawler and keeps its own index. A link one tool has found may be missing from another simply because it has not crawled that page recently. The practical answer is to pick one and use it consistently, so you are comparing like with like over time rather than chasing differences between vendors.
Are backlinks still relevant in 2026?
Yes, though less decisively than a decade ago. Links remain one of the ways search engines judge whether a page is trusted, but the weight has shifted towards content quality, relevance and user signals. The old game of accumulating as many links as possible stopped working long ago. A small number of genuinely relevant links now beats a large number of weak ones.
Do backlinks still matter in 2026?
They matter, and they matter differently now that AI-generated answers sit above traditional results. Being cited by trusted sites influences whether you are surfaced in those answers as well as in the blue links. So the reason to earn links has broadened rather than gone away: it is about being referenced by sources that both people and models already trust.
How can I check for toxic backlinks?
Look at the profile above for patterns rather than individual links. Warning signs are a sudden burst of links from unrelated domains, many links using the same exact keyword as anchor text, and links from sites that exist only to link out. A handful of odd links is normal for any site and is not worth acting on.
How to find toxic backlinks?
Download the CSV from the checker above and sort by linking domain and anchor text. Genuine link profiles are messy and varied. Manipulative ones look uniform: the same anchor, similar domains, all first seen within a short window. That uniformity is the signal, not any single link on its own.
How can I disavow toxic backlinks?
Through Google's disavow tool, by uploading a text file listing the URLs or domains to ignore. Do this only when you have confirmed paid or spam links, ideally alongside a manual action in Search Console. Disavowing on suspicion regularly removes links that were helping, and that is self-inflicted damage which takes a long time to reverse.
How to remove bad backlinks from a website?
You cannot remove a link from a site you do not control, so there are only two routes. Ask the site owner to take it down, which works more often than people expect for legitimate sites. Or, if that fails and the links are genuinely harmful, disavow them so Google ignores them. Removal is cleaner where it is possible.
What is a backlink example?
If a marketing blog writes about SEO tools and links the words "free backlink checker" to this page, that is a backlink to us. The anchor text is "free backlink checker", the linking domain is that blog, and if the link carries no nofollow attribute it passes ranking signals to the destination.
How to tell if a link is dofollow or nofollow?
Every link in the results above is labelled. Manually, view the page source and look at the anchor tag: a nofollow link carries rel="nofollow", and you will also see rel="sponsored" on paid links and rel="ugc" on user-generated ones. A link with no rel attribute at all is dofollow by default.
What does "dofollow" mean?
Dofollow is not really an attribute, it is just what a normal link is called when it lacks a nofollow attribute. Such links pass ranking signals to the page they point at. The term only exists because nofollow needed an opposite once it was introduced.
Is nofollow good for SEO?
Nofollow links do not pass ranking signals directly, but they are not worthless and a profile made entirely of dofollow links looks unnatural. They still send real visitors, and since 2019 Google has treated the attribute as a hint it may choose to ignore rather than a hard instruction. Do not turn down a good nofollow link from a site people actually read.
What is meant by anchor text?
The visible, clickable words that carry a link. They give search engines a strong clue about what the destination page covers, which is why anchor text is worth looking at in the results above. A natural profile contains a mix of brand names, bare URLs and varied descriptive phrases. The same exact keyword repeated across many links is the classic footprint of links that were bought rather than earned.
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