How to check the external links pointing to your site

Inbound and outbound are different checks

An inbound link (a backlink) comes from another domain to yours. It is the clearest external trust signal a site has, and you cannot see it by looking at your own pages. An outbound link leaves your page for another site; it is a recommendation you make, and the risk there is a broken destination rather than a missing one. When someone says "check external links to my site", they usually mean inbound. When they say "check the external links on my site", they mean outbound. Two directions, two different tools.

Why inbound links matter

Search engines treat a link from an established, relevant site as a vote. Volume matters less than quality and relevance: ten links from real publications beat a thousand from directories. Backlinks also bring direct visitors and are how most new sites are discovered at all. The absence of links, more than any on-page fault, is what keeps good pages stuck on page three.

How to check your backlinks

There are two honest sources. Google Search Console > Links shows the sites Google credits with linking to you, and it is the most complete for your own property. A public backlink check reads an open web-crawl index and, where available, search-engine link data, and reports the linking domains it can see. Shipwork does the second: it reads public data with nothing to connect, so you can see the shape of your link profile in one step.

What a free check can and cannot see

A public index is smaller than Google's and it lags, so it under-reports, especially for young or small sites. A domain that shows nothing in the crawl may still have links that Google knows about. That is why the check reports which source answered and does not turn a missing value into a zero as if it were a fact. It also reports domains and counts, not a hidden "authority score": that is a licensed metric, and inventing one would mislead you.

What to do with the list

Read it as a map, not a grade. Find the pages that attract links and make sure they are the ones you want ranking. Find the pages that do not and link to them internally so they are not orphans. If a specific low-quality link is part of a manual action, you can disavow it in Search Console, but that is a last resort for a penalty, not routine housekeeping: Google ignores most spam links on its own.

Questions

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