How to Check and Improve Your Backlink Profile
Backlinks remain one of the ways Google judges trust and authority. Here's how to check your link profile for free, what a healthy one looks like, and how to earn better links.
Key takeaways
- Search Console's Links report shows the external links Google knows about, for free.
- Quality and relevance matter far more than the number of links.
- Healthy profiles have links from varied, relevant, real sites with natural anchor text.
- The best links come from being genuinely useful or newsworthy, not from buying them.
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Google uses links as one signal of trust and relevance. Your backlink profile is the full set of links pointing to your site: who links, to which pages, and with what anchor text.
How to check your backlinks (free)
Google Search Console → Links shows:
- Top linked pages on your site
- Top linking sites
- Top linking text (anchor text)
It’s a sample, but it’s Google’s own data. Free tiers of tools like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (for verified sites) give more detail.
What a healthy profile looks like
| Healthy | Warning sign |
|---|---|
| Links from relevant sites in your industry or region | Mostly unrelated foreign sites |
| Many different referring domains | Hundreds of links from a few domains |
| Mostly brand and natural anchor text | Lots of exact-match keyword anchors |
| Links within real content | Links in footers, widgets and comment spam |
| Growth that matches your activity | Sudden spikes from unknown sources |
See anchor text best practices.
Common problems
- Links pointing to 404 pages: redirect those URLs to the closest relevant live page (fixing broken links)
- Spammy links: usually ignored by Google; see toxic backlinks and disavow
- Paid or exchanged links without
rel="sponsored"ornofollow: risk under Google’s link spam policies - Few links to commercial pages: use internal links from linked content
How to earn better links
- Create linkable assets: original data, local market research, free templates, definitive guides
- Digital PR: pitch expert comments and data stories to journalists and industry sites
- Partnerships: suppliers, associations, chambers of commerce, events you sponsor
- Unlinked mentions: ask sites that mention your brand to add a link
- Local citations and directories that are genuinely used in your industry
- Guest contributions on relevant, editorial sites (for audience, not just the link)
What to avoid
- Buying links or link packages
- Private blog networks
- Large-scale link exchanges
- Spammy guest posts on “write for us” sites with no audience
Google’s link spam updates increasingly neutralise these links, so the money is wasted even if you avoid a penalty.
Link profile checks are part of the full SEO audit.