Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Google treats them a bit like recommendations: the more trusted sites that link to your store, the more it trusts you too. Backlink Analysis shows who links to any site, how strong that profile is, and what's changing.
Which plans: Business (50 lookups a month) and Pro (200 a month). Each analysis uses one lookup.
Run an analysis
Open Backlink Analysis from the left menu.
Type a root domain, like
yourstore.com. Subdomains and single pages aren't supported yet.Click Analyze. The report appears in a few seconds, and History keeps every domain you've checked.
You can check any domain, not just your own. Looking at a competitor's links is one of the most useful things you can do here.
Read the overview
Rank and grade. One number for how strong the whole link profile is, with a grade from A to F and a one-line verdict. A brand new store usually starts low. That's normal.
The four totals.
Total backlinks: every individual link pointing at the site.
Referring domains: how many different websites link to it. This matters more than the total. Ten links from ten sites beat a hundred links from one.
Referring IPs: how many different servers those links come from. Lots of domains on very few servers can be a sign of a link network.
Broken backlinks: links you already earned that now point at pages that no longer work.
Link profile health. The split between dofollow links, which pass authority, and nofollow links, which don't. A natural profile usually has a mix of both.
Check your anchor text and link growth
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. A healthy profile is mostly your brand name, plain web addresses and links with no text, with only a small share of keyword-rich anchors like "best running shoes". If keyword-rich anchors go above about 40%, it can look manipulated to Google, and the report warns you.
Link velocity shows links gained and lost in the last 30 days and the net change, with a six-month chart underneath. Losing more than you gain is worth a look: a site may have removed a link or deleted the page it was on.
See every link
Three tabs. Backlinks lists individual linking pages. Referring domains shows one row per website. Broken lists links that point at dead pages on your site.
Each row shows the linking site, the anchor text, whether it's dofollow, the linking site's rank and when we first saw the link.
Use Export CSV at the top of the report to download the list.
Quick win: fix broken backlinks first. Redirect each dead page to the closest live page and you get the value of those links back. It's the only link building that takes five minutes.
Find sites that link to competitors but not to you
Under the table, Competitor link gap compares your domain with a competitor's. Enter their domain and click Find link gaps. You get the sites that link to them but not to you. Those sites already link to stores like yours, which makes them your best outreach list. It uses one lookup.
Seeing lots of strange links?
If dozens of unfamiliar sites with names like "buy backlinks" or "DA checker" suddenly link to you, all with the same anchor text, that's automated spam. It happens to most sites sooner or later. Google says it ignores most spammy links on its own, so don't panic and never pay anyone to "remove" them. If you've received a manual action in Google Search Console, Google's disavow tool is the way to tell it which links to ignore.
Good habits
Check your own profile once a month to catch lost and broken links early.
Never buy links. A sudden jump in links from low-quality sites can do more harm than good.
Earn links instead: useful guides, local press, suppliers and partners who can link to you.
Want the bigger picture on building authority? Read our guide to backlinks for online stores.