How to find out all inbound links to your site?

[Kickedout]

In the sample urls Google sent me (manual actions taken on my site) they send a link I couldn't find in the table downloaded from google webmaster tools really.

I guess the csv donwloaded is just incomplete, so I wonder if is there another way to find out ALL links to my site to kill them?

Any free tool?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Not sure if free is applicable, but MajesticSEO and Ahrefs are two of the best known backlink gathering tools. They have to grab a lot of data so much of the services provided are paid.

There are a couple more whose name escape me, but generally there aren't many services out there that can give you such data, especially for free.

[tangor]

All sympathy extended... you'd have to index the web to find out who and how many have LINKED to you--as that link might never be clicked by a user to let you know of same by showing up in your logs. In this case it will take a third party with greater budget, resource, and reach to answer that question. As noted above, that information is usually not free.

[Kickedout]

Thanks. I saw those aren't free. Is there any free alternative or there's absolutely no way to see my inbound links wihtout paying for?

[Biggy]

Hi Kickedout,

This is a rare post am making, was in ur situation some time back so trying to help.

I have paid subscriptions to ahrefs, majesticseo etc and from my experience I can tell you that there data is very limited to what Google knows. I have a lot of sites and have found that during the coarse of time some pharma spammer will often take a url of ur website and spam it along with his pharma links all over the net. If by luck u haven't witnessed this then as u gradually move up search rankings u will start to see automated content generated sites link to ur pages and the linking pages are in thousands across multiple domains. As Google updates ur sites are destined to sink for no fault of urs(algo penalty but the same can apply for manual penalty).

Paid backlink checkers are like something to work on when nothing else can be done.

With Google not letting u know all the back links but penalizing for bad links is a major handicap and a total injustice. I have seen penalties go as these content farms die but that may take months to years which is in any scenario not workable.

Early this year Matt Cutts asked for suggestions on improvements that can be made in Webmaster Tools and majority of suggestions where to give more back link data. Its almost May end and I still see no signs of that happening when there is nothing much needed to be done on Google's part to show more link data.

Did not want to sound negative, but am frustrated by this stand of Google as white hat webmasters are at the receiving end.

And yeah disavow tool helps (at least in algo penalty) but to make it work you need to know all the bad back links for which u have to be lucky by chance.

regards,
Biggy.

[Kickedout]

Thanks.

I assume many webmasters are in a similar situation. How do they find those links? Anybody?

[netmeg]

I don't know of any way to find a significant number of them for free.

It's true the paid tools don't get them all, but even what they do get consumes enough resources that it seems unlikely that a comprehensive tool would ever be offered for free.

[Biggy]

I have put a lot of time in trying to find the back links (even tried thinking out of the box :) ), its better to move ur domain otherwise ur wasting precious time.

I think a tool that gets a substantial amount of back link data is the need of the hour. I now miss Yahoo's site explorer more than ever (more competition was good).

Am sure that many webmasters will be willing to pay lot more to get that type of data. Hopefully existent back link checker companies see this as an opportunity and put more resources by adding more infrastructure or by mergers.

There is lot of redundant data on ahref, majestic, moz etc. So putting all resources together that is workable for their business would work fantastic.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Some of those backlink services have pretty huge indexes, but perhaps not as fresh as Googlebot.

Ultimately, any 3rd party tool might have the necessary depth but not the same snapshot/timeframe as what Googlebot saw. Even if every single conceivable page was fetched by a 3rd party tool, every hour, you can't be certain it's going to correlate with what Googlebot saw.

[tangor]

The only way to see what G saw is to see G's data.. and that won't happen. G does not play well with others and does not share. The few third parties out there range from mild cost to too-much.

Could we ask Bing to help out? For a dollar three-eighty on specific query/site can you tell us what YOU see?

(Though viewed as second, Bing really does have as good an engine as G)

[Biggy]

Some of those backlink services have pretty huge indexes, but perhaps not as fresh as Googlebot.

Ultimately, any 3rd party tool might have the necessary depth but not the same snapshot/timeframe as what Googlebot saw. Even if every single conceivable page was fetched by a 3rd party tool, every hour, you can't be certain it's going to correlate with what Googlebot saw.

I see this as a case of paralysis due to over analysis. I have yet to see a spammer who's constantly generating links to ur site by the minute. I have seen spammed links made > site ranks until Google updates > site tanks > ur site is forgotten by the spammer and left for u to deal with it.

There is a delay in links made and penalty slapped, and the same applies when spammy links are removed and penalty is lifted (u don't start ranking the very next minute).

The point here is to see maximum amount of backlinks of an already spammed domain. Even a snapshot that is about a month old from Google would do when it comes to disavowing or removing maximum number of spam links.

Google has no intention to show all back link data but that does not mean that they are lying when they say penalties can be lifted if they see effort made in removing spammy links (or disavowing them). They never asked to remove every spammy link.