How to find the backlinks of a website is one of the most useful SEO skills you can learn because backlinks reveal who trusts a site, which pages attract attention, and where competitors earn authority.
A backlink report can show referring domains, anchor text, follow status, lost links, spam risks, and content that naturally earns mentions across the web. When you read the data correctly, you stop guessing and start making smarter decisions about content, outreach, technical fixes, and long-term search growth.
Why Backlinks Still Matter For SEO
Backlinks still matter because search engines use them as signals of authority, relevance, and trust, but the real value lies in quality rather than raw volume. A website with 100 strong links from relevant, trusted sources can outperform a site with thousands of weak links from unrelated or spam-heavy pages. That is why backlink research should focus on who links to you, why they link, what page they link to, and whether that link helps or harms your organic visibility.
A good backlink review also helps you understand how your site fits into your market. SaaS brands, for example, often need links from industry blogs, software directories, comparison pages, and educational resources, and a service focused on revenue-driven SEO for SaaS companies can connect backlink insights to measurable pipeline growth. When you treat backlinks as business signals instead of vanity metrics, you build a clearer strategy for ranking pages that can actually generate leads.
How To Find The Backlinks Of A Website Step By Step
How to Find the backlinks of a website starts with choosing a reliable backlink checker, entering the domain or exact URL, and reviewing the referring domains before you look at individual links. Domain-level reports show every known site linking to the website, while URL-level reports show links pointing to one specific page. This distinction matters because a homepage may have many branded links, while a blog post, tool page, or comparison page may reveal the content that naturally earns links.
After that, review the core metrics in order: total backlinks, referring domains, anchor text, follow versus nofollow links, first-seen dates, lost links, and authority indicators. Do not panic if different tools show different numbers because each backlink database crawls the web differently. Your goal is not to find a perfect number, but to find useful patterns that explain authority, relevance, risk, and opportunity.
Choose The Right Backlink Checker
The best backlink checker is the one that gives you enough data to make decisions, not just a large number that looks impressive. Strong tools usually show referring domains, link source pages, target pages, anchor text, follow status, link history, authority metrics, and spam indicators. Some tools also show topical categories, IP diversity, broken backlinks, competitor gaps, and whether links are new, active, redirected, or lost.
Before investing heavily in link building, you need to know which keywords deserve attention and which pages need authority first. A structured approach to SaaS keyword research helps you connect backlink opportunities with search terms that match real buyer intent. When keyword priorities and backlink data work together, you avoid building links to pages that cannot support your commercial goals.
Analyze Referring Domains First
Referring domains are usually more important than total backlinks because 500 links from one weak domain rarely carry the same value as 50 links from 50 trusted websites. A healthy backlink profile usually includes links from different sites, industries, authors, and content formats. If most links come from a single network, a single directory type, or a single suspicious pattern, the site may look less natural than the total backlink count suggests.
You should also compare your referring domains with competitors to find the authority gap. If competing pages have links from industry publications, list posts, partners, and niche directories, you can study those sources and build a realistic outreach plan. A focused SaaS link building strategy should prioritize relevant placements, useful content assets, and relationship-driven outreach instead of chasing random links.
Read Anchor Text Like A Signal
Anchor text tells you how other websites describe the page they link to, and that makes it useful for understanding relevance. Branded anchors usually look natural, while exact-match anchors can help when used carefully and in moderation. If a site has too many keyword-heavy anchors from low-quality domains, it may look manipulative and pose a risk over time.
You should group anchors into categories such as branded, naked URL, topical, generic, and exact-match. This makes the backlink profile easier to assess because natural sites typically exhibit a varied anchor pattern. If one phrase dominates the profile too heavily, the safest move is to build more branded, topical, and editorial links that make the profile look balanced.
Check Follow And Nofollow Links
Follow links can pass ranking signals, while nofollow links usually tell search engines not to treat the link as a direct endorsement. That does not mean nofollow links are useless because they can still bring referral traffic, brand visibility, discovery, and natural mentions. A strong backlink profile often includes a mixture of follow, nofollow, sponsored, and user-generated links.
When reviewing a site, do not judge backlink quality by follow status alone. A nofollow link from a respected publication can be more valuable for visibility than a follow link from an irrelevant, low-trust page. The smarter question is whether the link comes from a real page, in a relevant context, with useful surrounding content, and a reason for readers to click.
Study Competitor Backlinks For Opportunities
Competitor backlink analysis helps you discover where similar sites already earn authority. Start by checking the top-ranking pages for your target keyword, then compare their referring domains, anchor text, content formats, and link sources. You may find patterns such as statistics pages, free tools, comparison articles, guest posts, podcasts, directories, and expert roundups.
The goal is not to copy every competitor link. Instead, identify link types that make sense for your brand and create something better, clearer, or more useful. If competitors earn links because they publish original data, your content gap may be research; if they earn links from software directories, your gap may be profile optimization and category placement.
Find Broken And Lost Backlinks
Broken backlinks point to pages that no longer work, and they can waste authority if they lead to 404 errors. You can find them by checking the target URL column in your backlink tool and filtering for lost pages, redirects, or not-found status codes. When you find valuable broken links, redirect the old page to a relevant live page or rebuild the original content if it still has search value.
Lost backlinks also deserve attention because they show which sites stopped linking to you. Some links disappear because pages are updated, deleted, redirected, or cleaned up by editors. If the lost link came from a strong, relevant source, a polite outreach message can sometimes recover it, especially when you provide an updated resource that improves the old reference.
Separate Good Links From Risky Links
A good backlink usually comes from a relevant website, appears inside useful content, uses natural anchor text, and points to a page that genuinely fits the topic. Risky backlinks often come from thin directories, hacked pages, irrelevant foreign-language spam, private blog networks, auto-generated pages, or sites packed with outbound links. The difference is not always obvious, so you should judge links by context rather than relying on one score.
Spam scores, authority metrics, and trust metrics are helpful warning signs, but they are not final verdicts. A low-authority niche blog may still be valuable if it has a real audience and topical relevance. A high-metric domain may still be risky if the page is irrelevant, paid, hidden, or surrounded by manipulative links.
Use Backlink Data To Improve Content
Backlink reports can show which content formats attract links in your niche. You may notice that statistics pages, calculators, original surveys, templates, glossary pages, and comparison articles earn more natural references than basic blog posts. This tells you what your audience and other publishers consider link-worthy.
Use that insight to create assets that answer questions better than existing pages. Add original examples, clearer definitions, updated data, practical steps, visuals, and expert commentary where competitors are thin. When a page becomes genuinely useful, outreach becomes easier because you are offering a resource that improves another person’s content.
Build A Simple Backlink Audit Routine
A backlink audit does not need to be complicated, but it should be consistent. Review your backlink profile monthly if your site is growing, running outreach, publishing heavily, or competing in a difficult niche. Smaller sites can start with a quarterly review and increase frequency when link activity becomes more important.
Your audit should cover new links, lost links, broken backlinks, suspicious domains, anchor text changes, and pages gaining the most links. Keep notes on patterns to see whether your authority is improving or drifting into risky territory. Over time, this routine helps you protect your site from bad links and double down on the content that attracts strong ones.
Common Mistakes To Avoid
One common mistake is judging a website only by the number of backlinks. Total backlinks can be inflated by sitewide links, spam, duplicate pages, and repeated links from the same domain. Referring domains, relevance, link placement, anchor diversity, and page quality usually tell a more accurate story.
Another mistake is copying competitor links without understanding why those links exist. Some competitor links may come from old partnerships, paid placements, expired campaigns, or pages that would not accept your site. You need to qualify each opportunity before adding it to your outreach list, or you may waste time chasing links that cannot help you.
Turn Backlink Insights Into Action
Once you know who links to a website, turn the data into a practical plan. Fix broken pages, reclaim valuable lost links, improve pages that already attract mentions, and create new assets based on proven link patterns. Then build outreach lists from relevant publications, directories, partners, podcasts, and resource pages that already link to similar content.
Track progress with simple metrics such as new referring domains, link quality, anchor diversity, rankings, referral traffic, and conversions. Backlinks should support business outcomes, not just SEO dashboards. When your backlink strategy improves visibility, traffic, and leads, you know it’s moving in the right direction.
Conclusion
How to find the backlinks of a website becomes much easier when you stop treating backlink tools as number generators and start using them as research systems. You need to review referring domains, anchor text, follow status, competitor links, lost links, broken pages, and link quality before deciding what to build next.
The strongest backlink strategies come from understanding why people link, which pages deserve authority, and what content gaps competitors have left open. When you combine backlink data with useful content, clean technical fixes, and careful outreach, you can build a healthier backlink profile that supports long-term rankings. Use the process regularly, stay focused on relevance, and let every link decision serve a clear SEO purpose.