You will need from time to time to check your backlinks in Google Search Console to see how you are ranking and to see your competition as well. As you well know this is a free tool designed to help webmasters to monitor their website’s health in the search index. The best feature Google Search Console has is monitoring backlinks so you can optimize your website’s performance. This way you can check which of your backlinks are still helping your authority and you can see which of them need to be disavowed. The ones that are not useful anymore need to go obviously.
Google Search Console
Back in the day, this tool was called Google Webmaster Tools so don’t get confused if you see this expression because old-school SEO experts are still using it. If you haven’t used this tool you need to start right away. This is a free service offered by Google. It can help you to maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. This tool can help you to understand and improve how Google sees your site. As you can see it’s more than just checking your backlinks. This is a very useful tool.
Checking backlinks on a small budget
You do not have to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to check your backlinks. You should save that money to invest in your education so you can create high-quality backlinks. This is the reason why we recommend using Google Search Console – it’s free. Checking backlinks is often a difficult task for blogs, websites, and businesses with a small budget. Especially if you don’t know about this free tool.
How to get started?
Before you do anything else you should go to Link Department’s website and check out the blog. You will find a lot more about this topic there. Or you can do it after and continue your research there. Your first step is going to be logging in (after the opening of course). You will see the control panel opening in front of you and that will show you a list of a website. You need to click on a website, which you want to check. Then click on an option of links shown on the left side. A page will appear in Google Search Console showing you links. You will see both internal and external links.
External and internal links
Even though you already know this one we need to mention it just for the ones who are just starting with link building and learning about backlinks. If you check out how Google defines those you will see this explanation “Internal links are hyperlinks on one page of your site that direct the reader to a target page on your site, whereas an external link is a hyperlink that directs the reader to a reputable page on a different website”. To simple it up this means that an internal link is a link created internally from one page of your website to some other page of your website. External links are obviously the ones coming from another website to your website. Even though Google is more precise when explaining we wanted to simplify it down a bit so that even the beginners can understand. Now, let’s continue.
The three options
Now, when you continue Google Search Console will give you three GSC options :
- top linked Pages
- top linking sites
- and finally top linking text
If you want to get the full report you will need to click on the “more” option. Another great thing you can do is export external links to Excel through the option “export external links”. If you can’t find it right away take a look in your upper right corner. That was pretty much how this is done. How do you like our little guide? Did you find it useful? Or complicated? This is a tool that everybody uses from regular consumers to SEO experts. Since we mentioned SEO experts we need to mention one other thing.
Outsourcing SEO
We completely understand if you are feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Backlinks are sometimes difficult to understand and making them great is often difficult. That’s why we told you that you need to continue your research. But what if you simply don’t have the time for it? After all, you have to handle your business, and deal with financial and legal parts unless you have someone doing that for you. Then there is your website which takes a lot of work if you want it to be successful. Backlink building strategies alone can be quite a handful. Nowadays you can find and outsource SEO experts that can take some load off your back.
Hiring SEO experts
First, you need to find a great and reputable company and make sure that they understand what you want. Then you need to check on them from time to time to see if your SEO company is helping you the way you want them to. After you are sure that this is what you wanted your job is done and your website will be in safe hands. What more can you want? The bigger your business gets and your website of course you will have to outsource more obviously. But if you want to see more about that you should read all about it on the Link Department’s blog. We just wanted to show you our little Google Search Console guide so you can check your backlinks for free.