Inbound Links

In this guide you’ll learn more about the Inbound Links section of Link Explorer. If you’re looking to troubleshoot why inbound links to your site haven’t been found, please see our troubleshooting guide.

Quick Links

• What Are Inbound Links?
• Find Inbound Links With Link Explorer
• Filter By Link Source
• Filter By Link Type & State
• View More Info
• Add to link Tracking List
• Export Your Data
• Understanding Link Explorer Terminology

Also known as backlinks, inbound links are hyperlinks from a page on the web to a page on your site. Search engines use these to understand content and to gauge the importance of pages and websites.

• Learn More About Backlinks

To find inbound links in Link Explorer, follow these steps within the Inbound Links section:

1. Use the drop-down to select the scope of your search and see data for a root domain, subdomain, or exact page
2. Enter the site you'd like to research into the search box and click Analyze
3. Select Followed on the right-hand side to filter by followed links
4. You'll see a list of backlinks sorted by descending Domain Authority (DA)

Looking for links in your backlink profile from a particular site? You can filter by Link Source by entering the site of the backlink.

Please note: When a Link Source is specified, we will show you the top 10 links from that source. In addition, it’s important to note that when a sort or filter is applied, the tool will look at the top 100,000 links. It doesn’t matter what domain these links are from. For example, if you have 5 million links and sort by PA, the tool will look at the top 100,000 links based on PA.

You can filter by Link Type to find follow or nofollow links, or links sent via redirect. Or you can filter by Link State so see links which are active or lost. This is particularly handy if you want to find follow links that have been marked as lost in our index.

• Learn more about why links are marked as lost

• Learn more about how to investigate lost links

Click on the arrow button in the More Info column to the right to see more information about a particular link. When the view is expanded, we will show you the date the link was first seen by our crawlers, the date the link could no longer be found, and where on your site that link points.

Link Tracking Lists can be helpful for setting goals, tracking, and analyzing your link building progress.

To add a link to your list, follow these steps:

1. Select the check box next to a link
2. Click Add to Link Tracking List

You can export your data to CSV using the button on the right. If you have filters applied, the tool will export the filtered results. Once your report is ready, you can download it from the Export Notifications flag on the top right.

Please note: The number of rows you’re able to export from Link Explorer is dependent on your subscription level.

• Learn more about exporting link data from Link Explorer

More definitions are available in our Glossary.

Domain Authority (DA) - Domain Authority is a Moz proprietary metric from 1-100 which predicts how well a domain will rank in Google based on a machine learning algorithm of link metrics.

Page Authority (PA) - Page Authority is a Moz proprietary metric from 1-100 which predicts how well a page will rank in Google based on a machine learning algorithm of link metrics.

Inbound Links (backlinks) - An incoming link from a page on another website back to your own site.

Spam Score - Represents the percentage of sites with similar features we've found to be penalized or banned by Google. This does not mean that the site is spammy. It’s best to use this is a guide to potentially spammy sites for further investigation.

Anchor Text- The visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.

Followed Links - Links that do not have a nofollow tag, these are crawled and indexed by the search engines.

Nofollow Links - Links that instruct crawlers not to follow links on a particular page or specific links. A nofollow directive can be added to a page or link on a page.

Links via Redirect - Inbound links pointing to a URL which redirects to the site you are tracking or researching. If page X links to page Y and page Y has a redirect to page Z, the link from page X will show up as a link "via redirect" to page Z.