Home » Questions » How do I find external links to my website?
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Savita asked 4 years ago
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Bikash Avinash Staff answered 2 months ago

Finding external links to your website is an essential aspect of monitoring your website’s backlink profile and understanding its visibility across the web. Here’s is a guide on how to find external links to your website:

  1. Google Search Console:
    • Sign in to Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmaster Tools) using your Google account.
    • Select your website property (if you haven’t added it yet, follow the instructions to do so).
    • Navigate to the “Links” section under “Search Traffic” to view external links pointing to your website. Google Search Console provides a list of domains and specific pages that link to your site.
  2. Backlink Analysis Tools:
    • Utilize backlink analysis tools such as Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, SEMrush, Majestic SEO, or Ubersuggest.
    • Enter your website’s URL into the tool’s search bar to generate a report of backlinks pointing to your site.
    • These tools provide valuable insights into the number of backlinks, referring domains, anchor text used, and the authority of the linking domains.
  3. Google Search Operators:
    • Use Google search operators to find external links to your website. Enter the following query into the Google search bar: link:yourwebsite.com Replace “yourwebsite.com” with your actual website URL.
    • Google will display a list of web pages that link to your site.
  4. Manual Search:
    • Perform manual searches using search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
    • Enter your website’s URL or specific pages into the search bar along with relevant keywords or phrases related to your content.
    • Scan through the search results to identify websites or pages that link back to your site.
  5. Social Media Mentions:
    • Monitor social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram for mentions of your website or content.
    • Use social media monitoring tools like Mention or Hootsuite to track brand mentions and links shared on social media platforms.
  6. Check Referral Traffic:
    • Analyze your website’s referral traffic in Google Analytics to identify websites that refer visitors to your site.
    • Navigate to “Acquisition” > “All Traffic” > “Referrals” in Google Analytics to view a list of websites sending traffic to your site via external links.
  7. Monitor Brand Mentions:
    • Set up Google Alerts or use social media monitoring tools to track mentions of your brand name, website URL, or specific content across the web.
    • Whenever your brand or website is mentioned, there’s a possibility of an accompanying link to your site.
  8. Competitor Analysis:
    • Analyze the backlink profiles of your competitors using backlink analysis tools.
    • Identify websites that link to your competitors’ sites and explore opportunities to acquire similar backlinks for your website.

By employing these methods, you can effectively identify external links pointing to your website, gain insights into your backlink profile, and track your website’s visibility and authority across the web. Regular monitoring and analysis of external links can help inform your link building and SEO strategies for improved website performance and rankings.

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Rishi answered 4 years ago

If another website links to you, it is considered an outbound link or external link. At the same time, if you link to another website, it is also an external link. Ordinarily, external links pass more an incentive than internal links. This is on the grounds that web indexes accept that what others state about you is a higher priority than what you state about yourself. At the end of the day, if more sites connect to your site, you will give off an impression of being a more trustworthy source. External links can also impact the reputation of your site. 
Here, you will read two ways or tools to find who links to you:
1. Google Search Console
Here to see who links to your website, you need to go to:
Search Console > choose your property > Links > External links > Top linking sites. After that you will get the list of sites plus the number of:

    • Linking pages (how many of their pages link to your website)
    • Target pages (how many of your web pages they’re linking to)

You can click any website on the list to see the individual web pages to which they link, plus how many times they do so. There’s also another report in Search Console that shows your top linked pages with below mentioned way:
Search Console > choose your property > Links > External links > Top linked pages.
2. Ahrefs Site Explorer
Ahrefs updated with fresh data every 15–30 minutes as our robots tirelessly crawl and recrawl the entire web. It has the world’s largest index of live backlinks. To check the external links Plug any website, subfolder or web page into Ahrefs Site Explorer to see how many backlinks and referring domains it has.
Site Explorer > enter website, web page or subfolder > select mode > Overview
Like Search Console, it shows the linking websites and the number of backlinks from each. But it also shows additional SEO metrics like:

  • Domain Rating (DR)
  • Nofollowed vs. “dofollowed” links
  • Estimated organic traffic to each linking domain
  • First seen (i.e., when we first saw each site linking to the target)