Free Backlink Checker: Find, Verify & Monitor Backlinks

Enter your domain in the Backlink Explorer tab. It lists real pages linking to you from Wikipedia (12 languages), Wikidata, Hacker News, Stack Overflow and Lobsters, with dates, target pages and upvotes. For links it can't discover on its own, such as guest posts or directory listings, paste the URLs or your Search Console links export into Verify & Monitor to check each one live. No signup is needed.

Yes. Links from relevant, trusted sites are still one of the main ways search engines discover pages and judge authority, and AI answer engines lean on the same well-cited sources. Quality matters far more than quantity: one editorial link from a respected site in your niche is worth more than hundreds of directory or comment links.

Domain Authority is Moz's 1-100 score that predicts how well a site might rank, based on its backlink profile in Moz's own index (Ahrefs' equivalent is Domain Rating). It isn't a Google metric. This tool shows an Estimated Authority instead, a transparent formula over public signals (Tranco rank, backlinks found, Wikipedia citations, domain age and archive history). Use it to compare sites directionally, not as a DA equivalent.

First ask the linking site's owner to remove the link. If that fails and the links are genuinely harmful (you have a manual action, or you built paid or scheme links), add them to a disavow file. Use the Disavow Builder to validate and deduplicate it, then upload it in Google Search Console's disavow tool. Google ignores most random spam automatically, so don't disavow links just because a tool flagged them.

There's no official ratio, but natural profiles are dominated by branded anchors (your name) and naked URLs, with generic anchors like 'here' or 'this article' next, and exact-match keyword anchors in the minority. If most of your anchors are the same money keyword, that pattern looks manipulated. Verify & Monitor shows the anchor of every link you check, and Page Link Audit breaks down the anchor mix on any page.

It depends on how competitive the keyword is and how strong the pages already ranking are. For low-competition long-tail terms, a handful of relevant links plus good content can be enough; competitive head terms may need links from hundreds of domains. Run Link Gap against the sites ranking above you to see where they're getting links that you aren't.

A dofollow link is a normal link with no restricting rel attribute; it can pass ranking signals. rel="nofollow", rel="ugc" (user-generated content) and rel="sponsored" (paid or affiliate) are hints asking search engines not to pass that value. A natural profile mixes both. The verifier reads the exact rel attribute from each page's live HTML, and it also flags a page-level meta robots nofollow, which cancels every link on the page.

Open the Disavow Builder tab and paste your existing file or upload one, or select links in Verify & Monitor and click 'Disavow as domains'. Click 'Validate, dedupe & sort' to fix bare domains, remove duplicates and URLs already covered by a domain: entry, and sort the file. Then download disavow.txt. It follows Google's format: one domain:example.com or full URL per line, with # comments, under 2 MB and 100,000 lines. Upload it in Search Console, remembering that a new upload replaces the old list.

No. Moz DA and Ahrefs DR come from crawling billions of pages in private indexes, and no free tool can reproduce them. This tool's Estimated Authority is a deterministic formula over public signals. It shows how many points came from Tranco rank, backlinks found, Wikipedia citations, domain age and archive history, and it publishes the exact formula on this page. The same inputs always give the same score.

Yes, it's free with no signup or API key. Click Verify on any backlink in the Explorer, or paste a list into Verify & Monitor. The checker fetches each page live and labels every link to your site as dofollow, nofollow, ugc or sponsored, with the anchor text and exact href. It also warns when a noindex tag or a canonical pointing elsewhere means the link carries little value.

Paste your linking pages or a Search Console export into Verify & Monitor. Every linking site gets a spam score with visible reasons: spam words or link-directory patterns in the domain, frequently abused TLDs, pages with 80-150+ outbound links, thin content and spam terms in the title. Filter to 'Spammy', review each page yourself, and only send the genuinely harmful ones to the Disavow Builder.

Type the website's domain into Backlink Explorer. You'll see which Wikipedia articles, Wikidata entities, Hacker News threads, Stack Overflow answers and Lobsters stories link to it, which of its pages get the most links, and when those links appeared. It works for any public domain, yours or a competitor's, without logging in.

Which sites and pages link to a domain, which of its pages attract links (content worth repeating), how link acquisition has changed over the years, how it compares with competitors, and where there are quick wins, such as broken pages that still receive links or brand mentions without a link. Export any table to CSV for your own analysis or a client report.

Yes. Enter the competitor's domain in Backlink Explorer, or use Link Gap to compare your site with up to three competitors at once. Link Gap lists every page that links to a competitor but not to you, and ranks pages that link to several competitors first, because they are the most likely to link to you as well.

Ahrefs, Semrush and Majestic run their own web crawlers and charge for access to indexes of trillions of links. A free tool can't query those indexes, and free tools that show large totals without one are estimating. This tool lists only links it can prove, from public indexes, and verifies any list you give it. For the full list of links Google knows about your own site, export Links from Google Search Console and upload the file into Verify & Monitor.

Run the Explorer or Verify & Monitor for a domain, then run it again later in the same browser. The tool compares the results with your previous snapshot and shows how many backlinks are new and lost, and in Verify, which ones changed (for example from dofollow to nofollow, or a different anchor). Snapshots are stored only in your browser. No account is required.

Yes. In Search Console open Links, choose 'Latest links' or 'Top linking sites', click Export, and upload the CSV in Verify & Monitor. Full URLs are checked live for link presence, anchor text and rel attributes. Bare domains from a 'Top linking sites' export are scored for spam signals so you can decide what, if anything, to disavow.

A link gap (or link intersect) analysis finds sites that link to your competitors but not to you. Those sites already link to content like yours, so they're far more likely to respond to outreach than a cold list. The Link Gap tab compares up to three competitors and ranks each prospect page by how many competitors it links to.

A broken backlink is a link from another site to a page on your site that now returns a 404 or other error, so the link's value is wasted and visitors hit a dead end. In the Explorer, click 'Check top 40 pages' under Broken backlink targets to test the live status of the pages your backlinks point to. Fix each broken one with a 301 redirect to the most relevant live page.

They are pages that mention your brand or product by name without linking to your site. The author already knows and likes you, so asking them to add a link is one of the easiest link-building wins. The Explorer finds candidates on Wikipedia and Hacker News. Set your brand name and a context keyword in Options to filter out other meanings of the same word.

It adds points for signals you can check yourself: spam keywords in the domain (for example casino or pharmacy) +45, link-directory or SEO-farm patterns +30, frequently abused TLDs +20, three or more hyphens +12, digit-heavy names +10, and, for pages the tool crawls, more than 150 outbound links +18 (80+ adds +8), thin content under 120 words +10, spam terms in the title +25 and noindex +5, capped at 100%. Hover any score to see which signals fired.

First try outreach to have them removed; for links you can't remove, Google's disavow tool tells search engines to ignore them.