Step by Step Guide to Checking Your Website Backlinks With Ease

Updated March 12, 2019

Start down the path to improving your website rankings with a website backlink check and detox.  Google organic search traffic can make the difference between great profit growth and bankruptcy for many small businesses who depend on the website for income.  Backlinks impact rankings – rankings draw traffic – traffic converts into cash.  Check backlinks, block bad ones, and clean up your backlink profile.  Get started – check backlinks today!

How to Check Backlinks

Getting the List of BackLinks

There are 100+ online tools you can use to find your backlinks.  Some are paid, others free.  In fact, you can freely use Google Search Console to get a list of backlinks to your site, just by signing up and visiting the page.

Before you can fix your backlink problems, you have to get the links, assess their risk (negative impact) and then do something about them.

Google Search Console only gives the backlink list.  Google Search Console doesn’t do anything to tell you whether any of those links are good or bad (and are possibly harming your rankings, traffic and income).

Assessing the Backlink List

Backlinks can have a positive or negative influence on your site.  When sites have little or no editorial control, allowing all types of unrelated content, spammy posts, accept money for links, or several other bad practices, a link from them can be risky to your site.  You won’t know for certain, since Google doesn’t share this information.  But – to an expert, there are a number of clues that add up to high risk – something to be avoided.

Rather than trying to teach years of SEO experience in a brief blog post, the author recommends you get the input of experts and use it.  In other words, you should rely on the scoring of experts to determine whether backlinks are good or bad.

Who can Assess Backlink Risk (Toxicity)

There are plenty of sites online where you can get expertly assessed backlinks.  Some of these include Cemper Link Research Tools, one that gives tons of details based on a myriad of criteria.  CognitiveSEO is another great source of information on backlinks.

Both of these great tools cost a fair amount of money.  When compared to the cost of having bad backlinks, it’s small, but for most small business websites, they may seem pricey.

How to Save Money on Backlink Assessments

Rather than paying full retail prices for backlink assessments, there are some vendors who use those tools in bulk, and then who sell on their services, passing along the savings.

For example, on Fiverr, there are gigs such as this which allow you to get a backlink report for about $25.  The reports will list your links, tagging them with various risk factors and giving an overall risk score which you can sort on (an Excel spreadsheet) and use to identify links needing removed.

What to do with Backlink Knowledge

Knowing that backlinks are risky is one thing.  Knowing what to do about it is another.  Stay tuned for further installments of improving website performance on the KnownHost blog.  Here’s a hint though…   Google Disavow Tool – the tool for notifying Google that some of those bad backlinks shouldn’t be used.