Free Backlink Checker

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.