Screaming Cow

The SEO crawler that won't stay quiet about your site's problems.

Are the links to your site still there?

Paste the pages that should link to you. Each one is fetched and read: the link, its anchor text, whether it is followed, and whether the page it sits on counts at all.

The domain the links should point at. A link to the www host and one to the bare host count as the same link.
One address per line, up to ten. Get the list from Search Console under Links, from Bing Webmaster Tools, or from wherever you keep your own record.

Not sure what to put in? Fill it in with a worked example

What a backlink is

A link from another domain to yours. Links inside your own site are internal links; a backlink is one that comes from outside.

Google's original idea was that a link is a vote, and that the vote counts in proportion to the authority of whoever casts it. It is still one of the signals most strongly correlated with ranking, and it does two other things besides: Google finds new pages by following links, and real people arrive through them.

What this tool checks

Give it your domain and the list of pages that are supposed to link to you. It fetches each one and answers, per page:

  • Whether the link is still there. Relative addresses are resolved against the address the page actually answered from, so a site that redirects to its www host does not come out as a lost link.
  • Whether it passes authority. A rel carrying nofollow, ugc or sponsored cancels it. All three, not just the first: looking only for nofollow reports comment links and paid links as if they were editorial.
  • What the link says. The anchor text, and the alt when the link is an image, which is the only thing a search engine reads there.
  • Whether the page it sits on counts. A page set to noindex, or carrying a page level nofollow that unfollows every anchor on it at once, is a link worth nothing. Neither is visible by looking at the page.
What this tool does not do

It does not discover links. Knowing who links to you requires an index of the whole web, and that index is literally the product of the handful of companies that sell it. What can be done without one is what this page does: confirm the links you already know about. And that is the half that rots quietly — a redesign drops the link, a plugin adds rel="ugc" to everything outbound, a migration leaves the page on noindex. Nothing turns red in any dashboard when it happens.

Where to get the list

  • Search Console → Links → Top linking sites. Free, and they are your links, the ones Google has seen.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools → Backlinks. Also free, and its index is not the same one, so it sees things Search Console does not.
  • Whatever spreadsheet you keep the guest posts, sponsorships and mentions in.

Common questions

How many pages can I check at once? Ten. Each one is a fetch of somebody else's site, so the tool is generous enough for a real link list and not generous enough to be used as anything else.

Is a nofollow link worthless? It passes no authority, but it still brings visitors and still helps you get found. A link profile with no nofollow links in it is also not a natural one.

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