Free backlink checker: see who links to any website

What this backlink checker shows

A backlink is a link from a page on another website to yours. A referring domain is a website that links to you at least once. This checker looks a domain up in DataForSEO’s backlink index, which is crawled continuously and holds roughly two trillion live links by DataForSEO’s own count. It summarises what it finds: backlinks and referring domains, referring IPs and subnets, dofollow and nofollow links, a link-authority rank and a spam score. It then lists the strongest referring domains, individual backlinks with their anchor text and first-seen date, and the most-used anchors. Where the index has history, you also see links gained and lost over time.

It is a third-party view, not Google’s. No crawler outside Google sees every link Google knows about, and Google itself says third-party tools have no access to its internal ranking data. For your own site, read this report alongside the Links report in Google Search Console, which is also a sample rather than a complete list.

How to use it

1. Enter a domain such as example.com. The checker looks up the whole registrable domain, so links to www and other subdomains are counted, and it counts only links that were live at the last crawl.
2. Start with referring domains, not the backlink total, then look at the dofollow share and the top referring domains.
3. Read the anchor text table. A natural profile is mostly brand names, bare URLs and ordinary phrases.
4. Open any link with a high spam score or from a site you don’t recognise, and decide whether it needs action. Usually it doesn’t.
5. Run your competitors too, and unlock the full list with your email when you want to work through every link in a spreadsheet.

How to read each metric

Backlinks vs referring domains

One site can link to you thousands of times from a sidebar or footer, so the backlink total is easy to inflate and hard to interpret. Referring domains show how many separate websites link to you, which is a better measure of breadth. DataForSEO counts subdomains separately (blog.example.com and example.com are two referring domains), so it also reports main domains. Referring IPs and subnets show how many different servers the links come from: many linking domains on one IP address or subnet can mean a network of sites run by one owner.

Dofollow and nofollow

A “nofollow” link carries rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" (ads and paid placements) or rel="ugc" (comments and forum posts). Google has treated all three as hints for ranking since September 2019, and for crawling and indexing since March 2020, so it may or may not count them. Nofollow links still send visitors and are a normal part of every healthy profile. A profile that is 100% dofollow can look as unnatural as one that is all nofollow.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link, and Google uses it to understand the page being linked to. Most natural anchors are your brand name, your URL or phrases such as “this guide”. Google’s spam policies list links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts and press releases as link spam, so a profile dominated by exact commercial phrases, such as “best SEO agency Dhaka”, is a warning sign.

Rank and spam score

The rank is DataForSEO’s own authority score, calculated across its link index with a formula based on Google’s original PageRank. Zero means no backlinks were found; higher numbers mean more links from pages that are themselves well linked. The spam score (0–100%) averages on-page signals of the linking pages, such as no HTTPS, unusual top-level domains, very many outbound links and no contact details. Neither is a Google metric. Use them to compare sites and to decide which links to look at, not as a verdict.

New and lost links

A lost link is one the crawler no longer finds, because the page changed, was removed or now returns an error. A steady trickle of losses is normal; a sudden drop in referring domains is worth investigating. If links point to pages on your site that now return 404, 301-redirect those URLs to the closest live page and confirm the result with the redirect checker. That recovers value you already earned.

Spam links and the disavow tool

Every site picks up junk links from scrapers and spam directories. Google says it can usually assess which links to trust and that most sites don’t need the disavow tool. Since the December 2022 link spam update, its SpamBrain system has detected both sites that buy links and sites used to pass them on, and neutralised the credit those links pass. Consider disavowing only if you, or an agency before you, built or bought links at scale and you have a manual action or expect one. Paid links are within the rules when they carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".

What to do with the results

• Find the gaps. Check the sites that outrank you. Referring domains they have and you don’t, such as industry associations, suppliers, partners and local media, become your outreach list.
• Earn links with things worth citing. Original data, useful tools, local guides and expert commentary attract links on their own. The content operations and link-earning guide covers what works in 2026.
• Think local. For a business in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan, a link from a relevant national news site, trade body or university usually means more to customers than dozens from unrelated foreign blogs. Be wary of cheap “high DA backlink” packages: buying links that pass ranking credit breaks Google’s spam policies.
• Fix what you control. Redirect old URLs that still have links, and make sure the pages people link to are indexable, using the free SEO audit.
• Measure outcomes, not link counts. See whether new links move rankings and visits with the website traffic checker and Search Console.

Frequently asked questions

Need a link audit, a clean-up after a bad agency, or a link-earning plan for your market? See my content and authority services or book a free strategy call.