How to check backlinks in Google Search Console, and what the Links report will not tell you

The Links report is the free backlink checker most store owners already have and rarely open. When they do open it, it is usually for the wrong reason: a sudden list of strange domains they have never heard of, followed by an evening reading about toxic links and a disavow file they did not need.

The report is useful, and the most valuable thing in it has nothing to do with spam.

The examples here come from a store selling garden tools: secateurs, loppers, pruning saws, hori hori knives, and the growing and pruning guides that sit on its blog. The report works the same way for any site.

How do you check backlinks in Google Search Console?

Open your property, select Links near the bottom of the left-hand menu, and read the External links half of the page. Google’s Links report documentation describes three tables there, and each answers a different question.

1. Top linked pages lists the pages on your site that other sites link to most. Click any row to see which sites link to that page.
2. Top linking sites lists the domains linking to you. Click a row to see which of your pages each one links to.
3. Top linking text lists the anchor text other sites use when they link to you.

The Internal links section alongside it is a separate view of how your own pages link to each other, and it is covered properly in our post on internal linking for ecommerce.

To get the data out, use the export button at the top of the report. Google offers two slices. “Latest links” is the most recently discovered links, up to 100,000 rows, sorted by discovery date. “More sample links” is a broader sample, also capped at 100,000 rows. Any single table can be exported on its own, up to 1,000 rows.

What does the Links report actually show?

It shows a sample of the links Google has found, grouped in ways that hide some detail. Google says so plainly: the report is not a comprehensive list of every link to your site. Four properties of the data matter before you draw any conclusion from it.

The tables are capped at 1,000 rows. A store rarely hits that, but a widely scraped site can, and rows past the cap do not appear.

Linking sites are grouped by root domain. Protocol, subdomains such as www or m., and subdirectories are stripped and merged into one row.

The report does not tell you whether a link is marked nofollow. A link from a forum signature and an editorial link from a well-read gardening column look identical in the table, even though Google treats them very differently.

Links can outlive the page they were on. Google notes the report may include links that have since been removed, because the data reflects what was found when the linking page was last crawled.

There is one column that earns its keep. When a link points at a URL that redirects or has a different canonical, the report shows the final target in “Target URL (if different)”. That is how you spot links pointing at old addresses, which comes up again below.

Why are my backlinks not showing in Search Console?

Usually because Google has not crawled the linking page yet, or because the link is there and hidden by the sampling and grouping. It is rarely a fault with your property.

Work through the likely causes in order.

1. The linking page has not been crawled since the link went up. A new review of your pruning saw on a small blog may not be revisited for a while, and until it is, the link does not exist as far as the report is concerned. In our experience new links often take weeks to appear.
2. The linking page is not indexed at all. Plenty of pages Google crawls never make the index, which we covered in crawled, currently not indexed. A link from a page Google has decided not to keep is unlikely to show.
3. It is grouped under a different row. A link from a subdomain sits under its root domain. Search for the root, not the full hostname.
4. It fell outside the sample. If the site has many links, the one you are looking for may not be in either the table or the export.
5. You are looking at the wrong target. A link to an old product URL that now redirects is listed against the old URL, with the new one in the target column.

Which backlinks in the report actually matter?

The ones pointing at pages you can do something with. The report’s best use for a store is not auditing links. It is finding which of your pages earn them.

Open Top linked pages and look at what is at the top. On a garden tools store it is almost never a product page. It is the guide to sharpening secateurs, the pruning calendar for fruit trees, the comparison of bypass and anvil loppers. Those are the pages allotment societies, gardening forums and hobby blogs choose to reference, because they answer a question.

That gives you two jobs, and both are worth an hour.

The first is to pass that authority on. A pruning guide with links from thirty sites carries weight your product and collection pages do not have. Link from that guide, in the body copy where it reads naturally, to the secateurs and loppers it discusses. It is the cheapest ranking lever a store has, and most stores skip it.

The second is to rescue links that point at dead pages. Filter Top linked pages for URLs that now return a 404: a discontinued hori hori knife, a guide you deleted in a tidy-up, an old collection handle. Every external link to a 404 is authority going nowhere. Redirect those URLs to the closest live equivalent, which is the one case where a redirect clearly earns its place. Our redirects guide covers how to choose the target.

Top linking text is worth a glance. If most anchors are your store name, bare URLs or phrases like “this guide”, the profile looks like a normal site that people link to without being asked. If a large share are exact product phrases such as “best bypass secateurs uk” and you never built a link in your life, look closer at where they come from.

Should you use the disavow tool?

Almost certainly not. Google’s own disavow links documentation says most sites will not need it, and sets two conditions that both have to hold: you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing at your site, and those links have caused a manual action or likely will.

The second condition is the one people skip. Every site that has been online for a while collects links it did not ask for: scraper sites that copy your guides wholesale, auto-generated directories, pages in languages you do not sell in. Seeing them in the report is not evidence of a problem.

Google also calls disavowing an advanced feature and warns that using it incorrectly can harm your site’s performance. The plausible failure is a file that sweeps up the gardening forum and hobby blogs along with the scrapers, and quietly throws away the links that were helping.

Before touching it, open the Manual actions report under Security and manual actions. If it says no issues were detected, you have your answer. Close the tab.

When is disavowing the right move?

When you, or someone you paid, built links that break Google’s rules. Google’s link spam policy lists what counts: buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges, automated link creation, advertorials whose links pass ranking credit, low-quality directory links and optimised links in forum posts or signatures.

If a previous agency sold the store a package of monthly links, and the Manual actions report shows “Unnatural links to your site”, then the process is clear.

1. Export the links and identify the ones from the paid work, using the old invoices rather than guesswork.
2. Ask for removal where a real site owner can be reached, and keep a record.
3. Disavow what could not be removed. Use domain: entries rather than individual URLs, since a bought link network rarely places one link per site. The file must be a .txt in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, with one entry per line and # for comments, under 100,000 lines and 2MB.
4. Submit a review request from the Manual actions report, describing what you removed and what you disavowed.

Google says it can take a few weeks to incorporate a disavow list, and link-related reconsideration requests can take longer than other reviews.

If you are being pitched link building right now, our post on what Shopify SEO should cost explains why a fixed number of links per month is the line item to question.

Is the Links report enough, or do you need a paid backlink tool?

For checking your own store, it is enough. It comes from Google’s crawl, it is free, and it shows which pages earn links and which linked URLs are broken.

Paid tools add three things the report cannot do. They show competitors’ links, flag nofollow, and track links you have lost over time. Those matter if you run outreach. To watch your own profile, you would be paying for a second opinion from an index that is not Google’s.

Our view from running a store: the hours small stores spend monitoring backlinks do more good spent on the guides that attract them.

What this costs to run

Checking the report by hand is quick. Once a quarter, export Top linked pages, note the top ten, check each links on to the products it mentions, and look for any linked URL returning a 404. On a store with a few dozen linking sites that is under an hour.

QueryClimb does not track backlinks, and we are not going to pretend it does. It covers the work either side of the report. Search Insights shows which guides are gaining impressions, the content calendar and the blog writer produce more of those guides from your real Search Console queries, and internal linking points your strongest articles at the products they discuss. The pricing is public, and the manual method works fine without it. The case study and the blog SEO system show that loop on our own store.

Frequently asked questions

How do I see who links to my website in Google Search Console?

Open the Links report from the left-hand menu and look at Top linking sites under External links. Use the export button for up to 100,000 of the most recently discovered links.

Does Google Search Console show all backlinks?

No. Google describes the Links report as a sample, not a comprehensive list. Tables are limited to 1,000 rows, linking sites are grouped by root domain, and links from pages Google has not crawled or indexed may not appear.

Why are my backlinks not showing in Search Console?

The most common reason is that Google has not recrawled the linking page since the link was added. Other causes are the linking page not being indexed, the link being grouped under its root domain, or the link pointing at an old URL that now redirects.

Does the Search Console Links report show nofollow links?

It does not say. The report lists links without marking whether they are nofollow, so a link that passes no ranking credit looks the same as one that does.

Should I disavow spammy backlinks?

Only if you have a manual action for unnatural links, or you knowingly built links that break Google’s link spam policy. Google says most sites will not need the disavow tool and warns it can harm performance if used incorrectly. Random scraper and directory links are normal and do not call for a disavow file.