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BY COPPER SUN
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12 min readBrass-SEO Team

Backlink Audit: How to Check Your Link Profile for Free

Link BuildingSeo AnalysisTechnical Seo

Most small business owners have never seen a list of their own backlinks. Not once. They know links matter for SEO in the abstract, but the actual list of who links to their site, what those links look like, and whether any of them are hurting more than helping sits unopened. That is a blind spot worth closing, and closing it costs nothing.

This is a mechanical, step-by-step walk through running a real backlink audit using free tools. No Ahrefs or Semrush subscription required. Part of the Link Building for Small Business series.

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A backlink audit answers four questions: who links to you, how good are those sites, what words they use to link, and whether your link count is growing or shrinking. Skip any one of the four and the audit tells you less than it should.

It is not a scorecard. There is no single number that tells you whether your link profile is healthy, despite what some tools imply with a color-coded score. What you are really doing is building a mental model of your site's off-page reputation: which pages earned outside trust, which sites vouch for you, and whether anything in that picture looks manufactured rather than earned.

Small business sites rarely need this audit monthly. Quarterly is enough for most. The exception is right after you notice a ranking drop, since a sudden change in your link profile is one of several possible causes worth ruling out.

Three sources cover almost everything a small business needs, and none of them cost a subscription.

Google Search Console's Links report. This is the most reliable source, because it is not an estimate. GSC shows the actual links Google's crawler found pointing at your site, pulled from Google's own index rather than a third party's crawl. If you use Brass-SEO, your GSC account is already connected, so the data is one click away. Google's own Search Console Help documentation caps each report table at 1,000 rows and describes itself as "a sample" rather than a complete list, but for a small business site that sample almost always covers the links that matter.

Ahrefs' free backlink checker. Ahrefs runs one of the larger independent web crawlers and, per Ahrefs' own product documentation, its no-signup tool shows up to 100 backlinks for any domain, along with total referring domain and backlink counts and each link's Domain Rating (DR), a 0-100 authority score Ahrefs assigns to the linking site. The free version is a snapshot, not the full index, but 100 links is enough to spot patterns in a small business link profile.

Moz Link Explorer's free tier. Moz allows a limited number of free lookups per month (Moz states 10 on its own pricing page) and returns Domain Authority, a comparable authority score, plus a spam score for the linking domain. Because the free allotment is small, save it for spot-checking a link that GSC or Ahrefs flagged rather than running it as your primary source.

Use GSC as ground truth for your own site and treat the third-party tools as a second opinion, especially useful for authority scoring that GSC does not provide.

Open Search Console, select your property, and click Links at the bottom of the left sidebar. Three tables matter.

Top linking sites lists the domains that link to you most, sorted by link count. Read down the list and ask a simple question of each one: do I recognize this site, and does it make sense that they would link to me? A local chamber of commerce, an industry directory, a partner business — those check out. A domain in a language your business doesn't operate in, with a name that means nothing to you, is worth a closer look.

Top linked pages shows which of your pages attract the most external links. This tells you what other sites consider worth referencing on your site, which is often not the page you'd guess. A comparison chart or a free calculator frequently out-earns your homepage.

Top linking text shows the anchor text — the clickable words — that other sites use when linking to you. This feeds directly into the anchor diversity check below.

Click Export external links in the top right to download the full sample as a spreadsheet. Do this once per audit and keep the file; it becomes your baseline for tracking change over time.

Ten links from ten different websites carry more weight than fifty links from one website. Referring domains, not raw link count, is the metric every major backlink tool leads with for a reason: one site linking to you fifty times across its blog footer still represents one entity's opinion of you.

When you review your GSC or Ahrefs export, count unique domains first, not unique URLs. A profile with 80 links from 60 different domains is healthier than one with 200 links from 15 domains, even though the second number looks bigger. Watch in particular for a handful of domains that account for a disproportionate share of your total links — that concentration is a normal byproduct of things like a syndicated press release, but it's worth knowing it's there rather than assuming your link count reflects sixty different endorsements when it reflects six.

Relevance matters as much as diversity. A link from a site in your city or your industry tells Google something specific about your business. A link from an unrelated site in an unrelated country tells Google less, even if that site has a respectable authority score.

Checking Anchor Text Diversity

Look at the Top linking text table in GSC or the anchor column in your Ahrefs export, and group the anchors into rough buckets: your brand name, your bare URL, generic phrases like "click here" or "read more," and exact-match keywords like "best plumber in [city]."

A natural link profile skews heavily toward the first three buckets. People who link to you organically use your business name or just paste your URL. They rarely use the exact commercial phrase you'd want to rank for, because that is not how people write when they're genuinely referencing something.

A profile where a large share of anchors are the same exact-match commercial phrase, repeated across many different domains, is the single clearest fingerprint of manipulated link building. Nobody naturally links to a plumbing company using the anchor text "best emergency plumber Denver" more than once or twice. If you see that pattern across a dozen links, those links were placed, not earned, and Google's algorithms are built specifically to discount exactly this pattern.

A handful of signals are worth flagging when you scan your export. None of them alone is proof of a problem, but stacking two or three on the same domain is a reason to dig further.

  • Irrelevant, low-quality sites — link farms, scraped content sites, or domains with no real content beyond a wall of outbound links, often in a niche with no plausible reason to reference you
  • Foreign-language sites with no connection to your business — a single stray link like this is normal (see below), but dozens from the same pattern is not
  • Exact-match commercial anchor text, as covered above, repeated across multiple unrelated domains
  • A sudden spike in links from many new domains in a short window — natural link growth is gradual; a burst usually means either a viral moment (good) or a bulk link purchase (not good)

If you find links that look genuinely toxic, and especially if they trace back to something like an old guest-post scheme or a previous SEO vendor's tactics, Link Building Without Cold Emails covers outreach approaches you can adapt for reclamation — contacting a webmaster to request a removal is the correct first step, not disavowing.

A single snapshot tells you what your link profile looks like today. It doesn't tell you whether things are improving. That requires comparison across time, which means you need a baseline.

Export your GSC Links report today and save the spreadsheet with the date in the filename. Do the same thing next quarter. Diff the two lists — most spreadsheet tools can highlight rows that appear in one file and not the other — and you'll see exactly which domains started linking to you and which stopped.

Gained links tell you what's working: a piece of content that's earning references, a partnership that's paying off, a press mention that's still driving traffic. Lost links are usually mundane — a partner site redesigned and dropped an old resources page, a directory shut down — but a cluster of lost links from a coordinated source is worth investigating.

What NOT to Panic About

A backlink audit surfaces things that look alarming at first glance and mean nothing on closer inspection. Knowing what to ignore saves you from wasting time on non-problems.

A few weird links from scrapers and content aggregators are normal. Any site that's been live for more than a year accumulates links from bots that scrape and republish web content automatically. These links carry effectively no weight in either direction. Seeing five or ten of them in an export of a hundred links is not a sign anything is wrong.

Google's algorithms already discount most low-quality links automatically. Google Search Central's own guidance states plainly that "in most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional" input from you, and that the disavow tool "generally isn't something you need to worry about" unless you've received a manual action notice in Search Console specifically citing unnatural links. For the overwhelming majority of small business sites, that notice never arrives.

Disavowing is a last resort, not a first step. Google's official guidance is to attempt manual link removal first, contacting the site owner and asking them to take the link down, before ever touching the disavow tool. Submitting a disavow file is easy to do wrong: disavow a domain that was actually helping you, and you remove value you didn't need to give up. Reserve it for a confirmed manual action penalty, not a suspicious-looking export.

One or two links you don't recognize are not a crisis. The internet is large, and pages get linked to for reasons the site owner never sees. Before assuming the worst, check whether the linking page even has meaningful traffic or authority. Most of the time it doesn't, and it isn't worth the time spent worrying about it.

Run the audit, note the patterns, fix what's clearly manufactured or manipulative, and leave the rest alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quarterly is enough for most small business sites. Link profiles don't shift fast under normal circumstances, and checking too often just means comparing near-identical snapshots. Audit sooner if you notice an unexplained ranking drop, since a link-profile change is one of several factors worth ruling out.

No. Google Search Console's Links report is free, comes directly from Google's own data, and is the most reliable source for your own site's backlinks. Ahrefs' free backlink checker and Moz Link Explorer's free tier add authority scoring that GSC doesn't provide. Together, the three free sources cover what a small business audit needs.

GSC shows links Google's own crawler found, which is first-party data with no estimation involved, but it's capped at 1,000 rows per table and described as a sample. Third-party tools like Ahrefs and Moz run independent crawls and add authority metrics like Domain Rating or Domain Authority, but their index may miss links GSC catches, and vice versa. Checking both gives a fuller picture than either alone.

No. Google's own guidance treats disavowing as a last resort for sites that have received a manual action notice specifically about unnatural links, not a routine cleanup step. Google's algorithms already discount most low-quality links without any action from you. Disavowing a link that was actually helping you costs more than it saves.

There's no target number worth chasing. A local service business can rank well with a few dozen relevant links from local and industry sources; a national site competing for broad terms may need far more. Focus the audit on quality and diversity of referring domains rather than a raw count.

Turn the Audit Into Action

A backlink audit tells you what's already there. The harder question is what to do next: which pages are worth building more links to, and which technical issues might be undercutting the links you already earned. Run a Page Audit on your top linked pages to make sure the content behind those links is holding up its end, and start a three-day free trial to ask Brass-SEO plain-English questions about your Google Search Console and Google Analytics data going forward.

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