Check backlinks for free: Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and when (not) to disavow

Free backlink sources at a glance

No tool shows every link on the web – the paid ones don’t either. The free sources below come from the search engines’ own data, which makes them the most relevant view of your site:

Search Console: the Links report step by step

Open Google Search Console, choose your property and click Links in the left menu. If you’re new to the tool, our Search Console guide walks you through the setup. The report is split into external and internal links.

Keep in mind that the data is a sample that’s updated regularly, not a live list. A new link can take weeks to show up, and a removed link may stay listed for a while. Here’s what each part tells you:

• Top linked pages: which of your pages get the most links from other sites. Click a row to see the sites linking to it.
• Top linking sites: the domains that link to you most. Click one to see which of your pages it links to.
• Top linking text: the anchor texts other sites use. Mostly your brand name and URL is normal; lots of exact-match sales keywords can be a sign of built links.
• Export external links (top right): choose Latest links for recently found links with the date they were first crawled, or More sample links for a broader sample. Export as CSV or Google Sheets.

Bing Webmaster Tools: a second opinion

Bing Webmaster Tools is free and often lists links that Search Console doesn’t. Sign in at bing.com/webmasters, add your site – the quickest way is importing it from Google Search Console – and open Backlinks in the menu.

You’ll see referring domains, the linking pages and their anchor texts, and you can export the list. A useful extra: enter a competitor’s domain to compare their backlinks with yours. Sites that link to similar businesses but not to you yet are natural candidates for outreach.

Bing’s index isn’t the same as Google’s, so the lists won’t match. Combining both exports gives you a fuller picture than either one alone.

How to judge a link

Merge your exports into one spreadsheet, sort by domain and go through the referring sites. Expect a lot of junk – scraper sites, auto-generated directories, strange foreign domains. That happens to every site and is almost never a problem. Good links also matter beyond Google: mentions on relevant sites are one of the signals behind recommendations in ChatGPT and AI search. For each notable site, ask:

• Is it a real site with real content and visitors, related to your topic or region?
• Does the link still exist? Open the page and search for your domain with Cmd+F or Ctrl+F.
• Is it a normal link, or marked nofollow, sponsored or ugc in its rel attribute? Google treats these as hints, so such links usually pass little ranking value.
• Is the linking page indexable? A link from a page with a noindex tag, or one blocked by robots.txt, is worth much less.
• Does the anchor text look natural – brand, URL, a description – or like a keyword someone paid for?

Lost links: what to do

Losing some links is normal – pages get deleted, sites get relaunched. It only matters when an important link disappears, for example from a local newspaper or an industry directory that sends you visitors. Here’s how to handle it:

• Check whether the linking page still exists or has moved to a new URL.
• If the link points to a page of yours that now returns a 404 error, add a 301 redirect to the best matching page. That rescues the link without any outreach.
• If the link was removed, a short, friendly email to the site owner often helps, especially if you can offer an updated page worth linking to.

When not to disavow (and when you should)

Google’s Disavow links tool lets you ask Google to ignore certain links. It sounds like a cleanup tool, but Google ignores most spammy links automatically, and using it wrongly can hurt: if you disavow links that were actually helping, you lose their value.

Many site owners reach for disavow after a traffic drop, but spam links are rarely the cause – check the usual reasons Google clicks drop first.

Disavowing makes sense in two situations: you have a manual action for unnatural links (Security & Manual Actions → Manual actions in Search Console), or you know of clearly built or paid spam links – say from an old SEO campaign – that you couldn’t get removed. Don’t disavow when:

• you just see random spammy domains in your report – every site has them
• the links are nofollow, sponsored or ugc anyway
• a third-party tool shows a high “toxic score” – that’s the tool’s estimate, not Google’s view
• your traffic dropped and you’re looking for a quick explanation
• you don’t know where the links came from and nothing suggests anyone built them

How to create a disavow file

If you really need one, first try to get the links removed by contacting the site owners. Then create a plain text file (.txt, UTF-8) with one entry per line: either a single URL, or domain: followed by a domain to disavow all links from that site. Lines starting with # are comments.

Upload it in Google’s Disavow links tool – it isn’t in the Search Console menu, so search for “Google disavow links tool” – and select the right property. Each upload replaces the previous file for that property, so always keep your complete list in one file. The change takes effect gradually as Google recrawls the pages. If you had a manual action, send a reconsideration request from the Manual actions report afterwards. A short example (the domains are made up):

# Disavow file for example.com, updated 2026-11-10
# Paid links from an old link-building campaign, removal requests unanswered
domain:cheap-links-network.example
domain:seo-article-directory.example

# Single spam pages on otherwise normal sites
https://forum.example.net/thread/12345-best-links
https://blog.example.org/2023/guest-post-casino/

Watch your backlinks with Rankpilot

Rankpilot is an iPhone and iPad app for website SEO, coming soon to the App Store. It connects to Bing Webmaster Tools and imports your backlinks from there, and you can import the external links CSV export from Google Search Console.

The backlink watcher then checks whether your links still exist, whether they’re follow or nofollow, and flags weak link sources such as noindex pages. In the rare case that you need one, Rankpilot also creates the disavow file for you. The app is free with an optional Pro subscription, and you don’t need an account.