Top 4 Ways to Find Inbound Links to a Website

It is important to find inbound links to a website.

Your competitor has 2,000 backlinks…

And you only have 50. How can you even compete with that?

If you want to build 2,000 backlinks in 1 year, that’s around 166 new links per month. At 150 USD per link, it would cost you $300,000! Should you quit while you’re ahead?

NOPE!

The truth is, your competitor does NOT have 2,000 backlinks. Fortunately, the number that both Ahrefs and SEMrush display for your competitor’s backlinks is always wildly inaccurate. 👉Go directly to why I say so.

But how exactly do you go about finding those inbound links?

Let’s dive into the various ways you can track down and leverage your website’s inbound link profile.

1. GSC: How to Check Backlinks in Google Search Console

Most people should start with Google Search Console since it’s free.

Create a free account if you haven’t already.

Check out your website’s links at:

Search Console > choose your property > Links > External links > Top linking sites

And the options:

• 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 see how many times a website links to an individual web page by clicking on anyone on the list.

Any of these reports can be downloaded and saved. Just click the download icon.

2. Google Operator: Use Google to Find Backlinks

A very basic way to use Google to find backlinks is this operator:

"competitorwebsite.com" -inurl:competitorwebsite.com

For example, I can use that to find backlinks to Openai

3. Check Gov Backlinks & Edu Backlinks

Here are the Google operators to find Edu Backlinks resources

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4. Ahrefs Backlink Checker Free

On Ahrefs, use the following filters:

1) DR:20+
2) Backlink Type:In Content 
3) Do-Follow

This should reduce the number of backlinks your competitors have by around 10x.
But we’re not done just yet!

Extract what’s left to a Google Sheet and get a virtual assistant to remove backlinks that are from:

• Scraper websites
• Backlink farms (Building Backlinks Is a Waste of Time)
• Sketchy websites
• Websites that drive no relevant traffic

And BAM, your competitor’s number of backlinks goes from 2,000 don’t to just 90.
From there, things are simple.
If your competitor has 90 real backlinks, and you only have 50, that means that all you need to do is build 4 backlinks per month to catch up and even get ahead!