Links report - Search Console Help (original) (raw)

See backlinks to your site

See who links to you the most, your top-linked pages, and more.

Open the links report

What's a backlink? A backlink is a link on a page from another site that links to a page on your site. It links back to your site.

Some notes about the data:

• Pages on your site are grouped by canonical URL. This means that the anchor tags and possibly some parameters are omitted before grouping.
• Duplicate links are combined. A duplicate link is a link from the same source URL to the same target URL, after removal of all parameters and other normalization. In the link text report, duplicates are based on link text not URL.
• Tables are limited to 1,000 rows, so tables may be truncated in larger or more linked-to sites.
• Totals shown above tables are not limited to 1,000 rows, but might omit URLs for various reasons, such as non-indexed pages, deduped URLs, and many other reasons.
• Although the report uses the term "site", data is actually grouped by root domain in the Links report; protocol (http/https), subdomain (m., www) and subdirectories are stripped and grouped together. Therefore, all the following are grouped under example.com:
  • example.com
  • m.example.com
  • example.com/pet_store/
  • https://example.com
  • http://example.com
• TLDs (top level domains) are not omitted when grouped and displayed, so the following are NOT identical:
  • example.com
  • example.com.de
• "External sites" or links are anything outside of your current property.
• The report includes links that Google has found over time. These links may have since been removed, or a page may no longer exist. The report doesn’t specify if a link is marked as nofollow.

This report has the following information:

External links

These are links outside your site:

Top linked pages (Pages most linked to on your site)

See which of your pages have the most backlinks from other sites. Use this to see if you're getting the recognition that you think you deserve.

To navigate there

Links report > External links > Top linked pages

Click the MORE link at the bottom of the table for the full list. Select a URL in the list to see the top sites linking to that page. Sites are shown by their root domain, with any subdomain omitted (so www.example.com would show as example.com).

Uses for this report

• Confirm that your most linked pages are the ones that you expect.

Top linking sites (Sites that link to you the most)

See which sites contain the most backlinks to your site.

This report shows the root domain of sites with the most links to your site, sorted by count of links. Sites are shown by their root domain, with any subdomain omitted (so www.example.com would show as example.com).

If you see a domain listed that is identical to your property, it is because it represents a subdomain that is omitted in the table. For example, if a link comes from m.example.com, the table entry will be example.com.

To navigate there

Links report > External links > Top linking sites

Click the MORE link at the bottom of the table for the full list. Click a site in the list to see your most linked pages from that site.

Sites are shown by their root domain, with any subdomain omitted (so www.example.com would show as example.com).

Uses for this report

• Confirm that you recognize the sites listed here. If you see any unknown and possibly spammy sites, you might need to ask to be removed or, if all else fails, disavow them to avoid having your ranking harmed by known spammy sites.
• See whether sites that are important to you point to your site. For example, if you have a restaurant website, are you mentioned in food blogs or review sites?

Top linking text (Most common text in links to your site)

See which link text is used in backlinks to your site. Covers only links from outside your property.

Duplicates are combined, where a duplicate is a case-insensitive exact match. So "Hello world" and "HELLO WORLD" are duplicates, but "Hello world" and "Hello worlds" are not duplicates.

Links with no text (for example, image links) are shown as "(empty)" in the Link Text column on the report, and as empty rows in the exported data.

Link text is grouped by exact match and sorted by count. Sites are shown by their root domain, with any subdomain omitted (so www.example.com would show as example.com).

To navigate there

Links report > External links > Top linking text

Click the MORE link at the bottom of the table for the full list.

Uses for this report

• Confirm that the link text is what you expect, and not spammy text.
• Confirm that other sites are describing your site accurately. If not, you might need to clarify your site content.

Top linking sites for a given page

See how many backlinks you get from a given site for a given page. You can only see this for a page that appears in the Top Linked Pages table.

To navigate there

Links report > External links > Top linked pages > MORE > URL of page to filter by

More detail

Click a site in Top sites linking to this page to see a list of pages on that site that link to the selected page.

Sites are shown by their root domain, with any subdomain omitted (so www.example.com would show as example.com).

Uses for this report

• If the linking site is good, see which pages are benefiting from that site.
• If the linking site is spammy, try to get these pages unlinked from this site. For known spam sites, Google typically will ignore the links, but you might want to remove or disavow these links.

Backlinks from a given site to a given page

See backlinks from a specific site to a specific page on your site.

To navigate there

You can navigate here in two ways, either through the target page or through the linking site:

Through the target page:

• Links report > External links > Top linked pages > MORE > URL of page to examine > URL of site to filter by

Through the linking site:

• Links report > External links > Top linking sites > MORE > URL of site to filter by > URL of page to filter by

Sites are shown by their root domain, with any subdomain omitted (so www.example.com would show as example.com).

Top linking pages table

The table includes the following columns:

• Linking page: The page that has a link to the target page on your site.
• Target URL (if different): If no value is shown, it means that the link URL on the linking page is identical to the URL of the target page. If a value is shown, it means that the link URL on the linking page is different from the URL of the target page. Here are two reasons why the link URL might not be the target page URL:
  • Your site redirects visitors from the link URL to the target URL. For example, your site might redirect users from example.com/old_page to example.com/replacement_page. You can test this by visiting the linking page and clicking this link, and tracking the redirects.
  • Google has decided that the canonical URL for URL on linking page is the target URL. In this case, if you visit the linking page and click the link, you would (probably) reach the actual link URL. However, if you do a Google search for URL on linking page and click the result, you would be redirected you to the (canonical) target URL.

Uses for this report

• Track down how users get from a given site to a given page.

Internal links

These are links within your own site to your own site:

Which pages link to a given page

See which pages on your site link to a specific page.

To navigate there

Links report > Internal links > Top linked pages > MORE > URL of page to filter by

Uses for this report

• Clean up the traffic flow within your site by confirming that users can get from page A to page B with the fewest clicks.

Exporting report data

Many reports provide an export button to export the report data. Both chart and table data are exported. Values shown as either ~ or - in the report (not available/not a number) will be zeros in the downloaded data.

You can export your link data as a CSV file or a Google Sheet.

Landing page

Export up to 100,000 rows of data using the Export button. The following data slices are available:

• Latest links
  The most recently discovered links to your site (up to 100,000 rows), sorted by discovery date.
• More sample links
  A sample of links to your site (up to 100,000 rows), extracted from the full set of links known to Google. This is useful when you have many more than 100,000 pages linking to your site, because it shows some data truncated by the Latest Links export due to length limits.

Single-table pages

Pages containing a single table offer a download button to export the entire table (up to 1,000 rows).The table sorting on the page does not affect the exported data.

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