How Many Backlinks Do I Have for My Site? How To Check

All good business owners and marketing team leads need to ask themselves, how many backlinks they have. That’s because building backlinks is an important but challenging part of search engine optimization (SEO). 

Our guide will show you how to check backlinks for your domain — both their quantity and quality — to deliver a complete analysis. We’ll also consider other link-related questions you need to answer to create a winning SEO strategy.

Why Should I Care About How Many Backlinks I Have?

Are backlinks really necessary for SEO and web traffic? Yes, they are!

Links to your site from other domains give you what SEO experts call “domain authority” or “site authority.” They are essentially votes of confidence in your site that support your overall digital and content marketing approach. Everyone is after them, which is why you need a strong backlink management strategy.

Another site linking to you as a reference gives evidence that you have beneficial information. Naturally, how many backlinks you have impacts how valuable your site appears to be, as does the authoritativeness or popularity of the domain linking to you.

As search engine bots crawl the web, they evaluate these connections between sites. They then use that data to determine whether to index your URLs at a higher or lower position on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Plus, more backlinks mean there is a greater chance someone will land on your page because they serve as additional “roads” or entry points to your site on the web. This increased traffic always impacts your rankings for the better. 

How Do I Find the Total Backlinks on My Site? (3 Helpful Tools)

Find out how many backlinks you have by using a backlink checker to generate a report. You can also get information about your backlinks and additional context by working with an SEO expert for your digital marketing.

Fortunately, there are multiple tools and resources you can use for checking backlinks, and some are free. Even better, you can use various tools to check the backlinks of your competitors to see how you stack up against their strategy. 

1. How BKA Content Helps You Check Backlinks

The easiest way to find out how many links you have and to determine what to do with them is by working with SEO experts. At BKA Content, our team has years of experience using SEO tools and helping clients build backlinks to increase site rankings.

For example, SeaQuest got a 38% organic traffic increase with our link-building strategy. The company also experienced a 22% increase in top-10 keyword rankings.

We’ll provide you with monthly reports and meet for regular check-ins. At these brief sessions, we can discuss the reason for changes in how many backlinks you have and how to improve your site metrics.

2. How To Check Backlinks With Semrush 

When taking a do-it-yourself approach, you can use Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool. Just enter your domain into the input field and click “Analyze.” The site returns a dashboard overview that includes the number of referring domains and backlinks.

In the “Backlinks” tab, you can examine more details about each link. You’ll see:

• How authoritative the linking site is by its “Authority Score”
• What anchor text the link uses
• When you acquired the link
• Whether the link is active or lost

Another helpful feature is the Backlink Gap tool. This shows where your competitors are getting links but you’re not. 

Semrush only offers a limited number of link reports with a free account. A paid account allows you to continually check for backlinks as part of your SEO strategy.

3. How To Use Google Search Console (GSC) To Check Links

Another DIY option (but one that is totally free) is GSC’s Links report. After signing in, select “Links” on the left-hand menu. The “External Links” section has reports showing your pages with the most links, which sites link to your page most, and the top linking text. 

Clicking “More” offers additional data. You can see how many backlinks you have coming to a page and which domains and pages the links are from.

Note that GSC only lets you examine your own sites, not those of competitors. This means you’ll have considerable limitations on crafting your company’s link-building strategy if using it alone. You also have to contend with some data limits.

As we mentioned, you can find a lot of other software for checking backlinks. A few more top link-building tools in the market are:

• Moz Pro
• Ahrefs
• Ubersuggest
• BuzzSumo
• BuzzStream

Any of these options can quickly tell you how many backlinks you do have. Your choice really comes down to how user-friendly it is and what analytics it can provide for improving your link-building campaigns.

How Many Backlinks Should I Have?

According to SEO experts, you should aim to have 40-50 backlinks to your site’s homepage and up to 100 on your subpages. In general, you shouldn’t try to go too high above those figures, as it can make it appear that you’re using unethical practices for link-building.

Bear in mind that those numbers are only a broad generalization. You can only determine the actual number of how many backlinks you need to have by analyzing your industry, your existing domain authority, and how many links your competitors have. 

Concentrate on outperforming your competition in quality more than quantity. If your domain authority is low despite having as many links as your competition or more, that’s a good sign that you need to improve the quality of your backlinks instead of focusing on how many you have.

What Kind of Backlinks Are Good for SEO?

You can’t have too many high-quality backlinks. Develop a strategy that attracts links with the following characteristics. 

Links From Top-Notch Sites

High-quality hyperlinks add value to the visitor. When doing SEO, you need to understand Google’s E-E-A-T philosophy to understand which pages the search engine sees as bringing that value.

Its algorithm tries to highly rank sites that demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Sites that are high in E-E-A-T can confer some of that prestige to you by association, i.e., through backlinks.

Use your SEO link-building tools to determine how many backlinks you have coming from sites with lots of E-E-A-T. If you don’t have many, start targeting those kind of sites.

Dofollow Links

“Dofollow” links contribute the most to link-building. All backlinks are dofollow links by default; however, a site’s webmaster can assign a “nofollow” tag to any link on their site. This attribute tells the web crawler to ignore the link, denying it the benefits of the site’s E-E-A-T.

Why do this? Well, a company could intrusively leave its URLs in comments and message boards around the web to build backlinks. This is the kind of spammy tactic that Google doesn’t care for. Therefore, sites usually put a nofollow tag in these sections for any links that show up there.

Also, sponsored and UGC tags function like nofollow links. These tell the bot that the URL is either a paid link or user-generated content, respectively. While nofollow links are still able to build site traffic, they don’t accomplish as much as dofollow links. Pay attention to how many backlinks you have in the dofollow category.

Relevant Links

Links that come from a related vertical are more valuable than those that don’t. For example, a link to a site that sells makeup fits well on a page that promotes hair care or apparel. That link probably won’t do so well on a page about commercial electrical repair. 

Google tends to ignore irrelevant links and rightly so. Pursue getting backlinks on pages that make sense — not just any and everywhere you can get them. 

The relevance and quality of the anchor text matters, too. The hyperlink should be in a word or phrase that deals with the subject of the landing page and gives the reader a reason to click. If links are unnatural, you’ll get fewer clicks anyway, and search engines might devalue those links and your website, no matter how many backlinks you have.

Does It Take Long for Backlinks To Help My SEO? 

Practically every aspect of SEO involves playing the “long game” to achieve success. Therefore, you need patience to wait for the real results.

In the case of backlinks, you could start seeing results in as few as three months, but it might take a year to make a full impact, especially in a competitive market. That fact highlights the importance of starting your link-building strategy as soon as you can to begin reaping the benefits.

Who Can Help Me Get as Many Backlinks as I Should Have?

Link-building and other SEO practices are key to a successful digital marketing strategy but require a steady grind. Making it happen demands continuous content and persistent outreach.

If you want results sooner rather than later, our crew is at the ready. Talk to our SEO experts at BKA Content to see how our white hat link-building services can help you determine how many backlinks you currently have, as well as enhance your site’s relevancy, engagement, and domain authority.