Ah, yes, backlinks. Love them or hate them, they are an important ranking factor in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
So if you’re wanting to do a deep dive into your website’s backlink profile and you’re trying to figure out how many backlinks do I have, keep reading.
HOW TO FIND OUT ABOUT HOW MANY BACKLINKS YOU HAVE
There are a few different ways you can check this. So, let’s take a look.
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
The single best way to know how many links you have (that are actually benefiting your site) is to look at Google Search Console.
Once you’re logged into your profile, you’ll see this tab on the left-hand side near the bottom:
After clicking it, you’ll be able to see all the domains that are linking to your website in the “external links” section.
You can even take your analysis one step further by looking at how many times websites have linked to you and by looking at what anchor text they used.
It’s worth mentioning that backlinks can take a few days (or longer) to show up in the Google search console. So if you’ve just acquired a new link and it’s not showing, you may need to come back in a couple of days to check if Google has picked it up.
SEMRUSH
When we say SEMRUSH, it doesn’t necessarily have to be this SEO tool, as many others do exactly the same thing (MOZ, Ahrefs, etc.). However, for the purpose of this post, we’re going to talk about it.
SEO tools like this one scan the web to see what backlinks your website has. All you have to do is put it into your URL and let the tool do its work.
After it’s finished, you’ll see links that are pointing to your site, both do-follow and don’t-follow links.
The reason why we recommend using Google Search Console over tools like this is that Google may not know some of the backlinks listed actually exist. Say, what?
Well, unless Google has actually crawled and indexed the page and found the backlink, it’s not going to benefit your site or have any influence. So, on paper, your backlink profile may look good, but in reality, none of the links will help you.
FINISHING THOUGHTS
When trying to find out, “how many backlinks do I have?” you can use the different methods we’ve mentioned here. The process isn’t as difficult as you may have thought, so get to work and take a look at how your website is doing!