What Are Backlinks in SEO? Everything You Need to Know

Backlinks (aka inbound links, incoming links) are links from a page on one website to another. Search engines like Google use backlinks as votes of confidence in ranking pages.

Backlinks are important for SEO because of two main reasons:

1. Rankings – Generally speaking, the more backlinks your webpages have, the more likely they are to rank for relevant search queries (we confirmed this in a study).
2. Discoverability – Search engines revisit popular pages more often than unpopular ones. And they may discover your content faster if you get backlinks from popular pages.

There are two ways to check a website or webpage’s backlinks.

The first method only works for sites that you own. Use the second one to check backlinks to another website or webpage.

Checking backlinks to your website

A basic tool for checking backlinks to your website is the free Google Search Console.

Once signed in, click “Links” on the sidebar. The number below “External links” shows the total number of unique backlinks to the website.

Google Search Console shows limited data in the app (top 1,000 links) and won’t show you some useful SEO metrics you could use to analyze your backlinks. To get more data for free, you can use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Once you set up a project, click on Backlinks in the dashboard.

This will take you to the Backlinks report in the Site Explorer tool. This report will show all your backlinks and relevant backlink data.

Checking backlinks to another website

You can start...