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Find out who’s linking to your website using Google Search Console.

How to use Google Search Console to find out who’s linking to your website.

If you’re looking to build a strong backlink strategy, you’ve probably wondered “where can I find backlinks to my website?” at some point - or at least, you should have. We know they’re valuable and SEO-boosting, but it can be tricky finding out which websites are linking to your own.

Nurturing your relationships with your linkers is important for keeping a notable digital reputation and maintaining your presence online. So if you want to know who’s linking to your website and how to check your backlinks, we’re here to help.

With our handy guide, we’re going to show you how to check a website’s backlinks using Google Search Console.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a web service that offers tools and reports to help you measure and optimise your site’s Google Search traffic and performance. With Google Search Console, you can:

  • View Google Search traffic data for your site
  • Troubleshoot issues for mobile usability
  • Fix indexing problems
  • See which sites link to your website.

Backlinks are the gold dust that, when sprinkled appropriately through your website, can boost your positioning in search engine results. They pack a ranking punch, as the more you have from multiple credible websites, the better you should perform in search engines like Google.

So, curiosity has gotten the better of you and you’re itching to know who’s linking to your site and which pages are drawing the most links. Once you’ve signed into your Google Search Console account, navigate to choose your property > links > external links > top linking sites.

Once you’ve navigated to your top linking sites, these will be listed by default (how many of the external site’s pages like to your website) and target pages (how many of your individual web pages the external site is linking to).

Click on any of the listed websites to see which of your web pages they are linking to, and how many times they do.

How can you see your most linked-to pages?

Perhaps you’d like to understand which of your content has the most user value. A good indication of this is the number of backlinks to your web pages. Luckily for you, Google Search Console provides downloadable reports as to your most popularly linked pages. To see them, simply navigate to choose your property > links > external links > top linked pages to see which of your web pages are receiving the most links.

This report automatically defaults to show you which pages have the most links from unique websites. If you change the report to sort results by linking sites, you’ll be able to view your pages in order of which have the most links from unique websites. Click any web page to see the number of backlinks and the top linking sites.

Unfortunately, these top linked page reports do not provide link context, so you won’t know exactly which areas of the page are the anchor text for your backlinks. They also don’t provide any quality metrics to indicate how any of the linking sites are impacting your SEO, so you may have to don your digital detective cap and do some digging.

We thought we’d spare some of our SEO expertise and give you some tips on how to improve your search ranking, and increase your organic traffic, using a backlink strategy.

  • Understand your most linked content - Understanding why certain pages receive more links than others can help you to duplicate the value across your other pages. Look for commonalities among your most linked pages to correlate the topics, formats and styles that most engage other websites. Look to replicate these characteristics in your content moving forward.
  • Choose your topics wisely - For pages focused on competitive topics to rank, they require hundreds of backlinks from unique, credible websites. Realistically, your strategy will be more effective if you choose less competitive topics and keywords as you stand a higher chance of ranking.
  • Maximise your existing links - Backlinks add value to your website that can be shared across your pages using internal links. If a popular page has a relevant blog or similar page you can link to, do it.

We’re here to provide a expert helping hand.

Now we’ve shown you how to easily view your backlinks on Google Search Console, so you can confidently optimise your backlink strategy. 

However, if you need an experienced SEO specialist to offer guidance whilst saving you precious time, Team Red can help with that too.

Find out more about our remarkable SEO services, including SEO management and keyword research.