What is a Backlink Checker?
A backlink checker tool allows you to view publicly available information on which websites are linking to each other. This has long been a crucial way for SEOs to assess other sites and see how popular they are with other website owners on the world-wide-web. One of the most important uses of a backlink analysis tools is for Link Spam. As a marketing fear tactic, many SEO tools also publish “toxic backlink analysis” reports which Google vehemently argue against.
What do Backlinks do?
Since Google arrived on the scene in 1996-1998, it took over the global search market space with a single invention: PageRank – which made backlinks the authority for which content is ranked in its free internet search. Before PageRank, search engines “trusted” individual pages and sites to rank for what they said they were – which made them all pretty useless. By adopting the best and only objective standard, Google was able to create a search engine that seemed to understand the internet by understanding how sites voted for each other. See our post on SEO, PageRank, and Authority for more background.
Backlink Checking Tools
There are a number of backlink checkers available on the internet
- SEMrush
- AHrefs
- Moz
- Bing (free)
Bing Backlink Checker
How to Use the Bing Backlink Checker
Don’t have a Bing Webmaster account? Don’t worry, Bing will cross-honor your Google Search Console (GSC) credentials and immediately access your SEO data on Bing, without needing to setup a separate validation process. Read our post on setting up Bing’s Free SEO tools for more information.
Once you’re setup, click on the Bing “Backlinks” link in the Webmaster left hand side navigation bar
Backlink Overview
Bing’s free Backlink checker tool lets you see your own backlinks as well as those to any other domain – up to 2 extra domains at a time!
Using the Bing Free Backlink Checker
Research Backlinks
Click on “Backlinks to Any Site”
In this example, I’m comparing my current 1 link domain with a popular SEO’s who has over 68k links. Under the overview is the section that lists all of the top domains linking in to the site we’re scanning. This shows the domains and the number of links to the domain we’re looking at.
The detailed report lists from 25 to 100 domains per page and lets you order it by domain or by anchor text
This lets us compare how many links each domain has to each of the sites we’re comparing:
We can also look at the count of keywords in the anchor text references from each referring domain to the domains we’re tracking:
This way you can see what relevance each link is coming under and what context it sends
Backlinks and Link Spam
No blog post about backlinks would be complete without mentioning Link Spam. Link Spam is the name given by Google to the practise of earning, creating, buying or otherwise getting backlinks in exchange for something in order to manipulate Google Search. Its the the number one blackhat technique aimed at lifting the visibility of websites and it seems to be extremely widespread. Link Spam terrifies so many webmasters that its given rise to a panic about unrecognized backlinks and the name has blurred with what people often refer to as Spammy looking links – links they do not recognize and fear will somehow be detrimental to their SEO efforts, which is exaggerated and not the case.
Backlink Checker Tool video
