How to check your backlinks and audit what you find
Ten minutes to pull the data, longer to judge it, which sources to trust, what the authority scores mean, and why disavow is a last resort.
Learning how to check your backlinks takes ten minutes. Working out which of them matter takes longer, and it is the part that changes what you do next.
What a backlink check actually tells you
A backlink is a link from another site to yours. Search engines treat some of them as votes, which is why an inbound link checker is a standard part of any SEO toolkit. What a backlink checker returns is a list of referring pages, the anchor text they used, and some scoring of how much each source is worth.
That last number is the one to be careful with. No tool has Google’s index, so every authority score you see is a vendor’s estimate built from a vendor’s crawl. Two backlink checkers will hand you different totals for the same domain, and neither is wrong so much as differently incomplete.
Where to check backlinks, free and paid
Start with the one source that is not an estimate.
Google Search Console is free, it is yours, and its Links report comes from Google’s own data. It shows top linking sites, top linked pages, and top anchor text. It is less detailed than commercial tools and more trustworthy about what Google actually knows.
For a wider view, the commercial crawlers each offer a limited free tier: Ahrefs’ free backlink checker, Semrush, Moz Link Explorer, and Majestic. Expect a capped number of rows and a prompt to upgrade. For a small site that cap is often enough.
Run the same domain through two of them before you conclude anything. If one reports 400 referring domains and another reports 180, the truth is that neither has crawled everything.
The metrics, and what they are worth
Every tool invents its own score. They correlate loosely with each other and none of them is a Google metric.
| Metric | Tool | What it estimates |
|---|---|---|
| Domain Authority (DA) | Moz | Ranking strength of a whole domain |
| Domain Rating (DR) | Ahrefs | Backlink profile strength of a domain |
| Authority Score | Semrush | Blended authority, traffic and spam signals |
| Trust Flow | Majestic | Proximity to a trusted seed set |
| Spam Score | Moz | Likelihood a domain resembles penalised ones |
Two habits keep these useful. Compare within one tool, never across them. And treat relevance as a separate axis: a DR 30 link from a site about your exact subject often does more than a DR 70 link from a general directory.
Judging quality without a score
Open ten referring pages and look at them. You will learn more in fifteen minutes than from any dashboard.
Ask four things of each:
- Is the page about anything? Real editorial content, or a list of outbound links with filler around it.
- Would a human land there? Pages with no internal links pointing at them exist for crawlers, not readers.
- Is the link in context? Inside a sentence that has a reason to reference you, rather than in a footer block.
- Is the anchor text natural? A run of exact-match commercial anchors is a pattern, and patterns are what get looked at.
A worked example
Say you run a small accounting SaaS and your checker returns three new links this month:
- A regional business magazine, linking from an article about invoicing rules, anchor text “cloud accounting tools”. Editorial, relevant, natural anchor. Keep, and consider whether the journalist covers your subject often enough to be worth a relationship.
- A general “top 200 business resources” page with 340 outbound links and no visible author, anchor text “best accounting software 2026”. Low value. Harmless, but it will never do anything for you.
- A gambling site in another language, linking from a comment thread, anchor text “accounting software cheap”. This is the pattern to watch: irrelevant subject, foreign language, commercial anchor, user-generated placement.
Only the third is worth further thought, and even then the answer is usually to leave it alone. Which brings us to the tool everyone reaches for too quickly.
Disavow is a last resort, not routine maintenance
Google’s disavow tool tells the search engine to ignore specified links. It exists mainly for sites recovering from a manual action, and Google has said repeatedly that most sites never need it.
The risk runs one way. Disavowing a bad link that was already being ignored gains you nothing. Disavowing a good link you misjudged removes a real signal. Given that asymmetry, the bar for using it should be high:
- You have a manual action in Search Console naming unnatural links, or
- You bought links in the past and want to distance yourself from them.
An unfamiliar domain in your report is not a reason. Spam links pointing at you without your involvement are, in the ordinary case, simply discounted.
Monitoring, once the audit is done
An audit is a snapshot. What you want ongoing is a small, boring routine:
- Check Search Console monthly for sudden changes in linking domains.
- Watch for lost links to pages that convert, since those are worth an email asking why.
- Note new links to pages you did not promote, because that is where unplanned demand shows up.
What this has to do with the pages you control
Backlinks are one input. The other is whether the pages earning them can be crawled, read and quoted in the first place. A page with strong inbound links that ships no content in its HTML is a page that spends its authority on nothing, and answer engines that do not execute JavaScript will simply skip it.
That half is fully in your control and is what the free Crawld scorecard measures: 129 checks across indexability, structure, content health and answer-engine readiness, with the coverage figure alongside the score. It does not check backlinks, and the transparency page lists exactly what it does and does not do. For the on-page side of the same problem, the SEO audit checklist walks through it.