Track backlinks with Google Search Console

Backlinks are often invaluable when it comes to ranking your website in various search engines. The question is, after you've worked hard to get them, are they actually active? And linking to your website. There are a lot of different tools on the internet that you can use to keep track of your backlink profile. But you can also easily keep track of it in the tool that many webmasters have active, Google Search Console. Let's start by taking a look at the backlink profile in Google Search Console!

Backlinks are still a crucial component to a website's ranking on Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. While in recent years it has become increasingly important how the backlink was obtained, whether it fits the theme of your website hosting and whether it is of high quality rather than from a home page website. This used to be the way to artificially pump up a website in search results. However, Google and other search engines have now put a stop to this. With the latest SPAM updates and core updates, it's getting better at detecting abuse or unfair play. And websites that take advantage of this are being punished more quickly by de-indexing pages or even removing them from Google.

The place backlinks show up within Google Search Console.

To keep track of your backlinks within Google Search Console, you can go to the following place in the left menu.

So at Links is where you can see it within Google Search Console, but you have a number of different types of links on that page where it may not be immediately clear. What are the real backlinks. You can find these at the following location, which is indicated with sites with the most links to your site.

You will see all the sites that link to you, sorted by the largest number of links pointing to your site. You can also view more information here by clicking on one of the links and then seeing exactly which site is linked to. And where that link is located on the external website. Often these are forums, other websites, or news organizations. But of course, this can be any type of website. Google does a better job than other tools at not seeing all the backlink SPAM. This is a natural process that every website goes through as it ages.

Once you see the pages linking to your website web hosting here, you will also see exactly where they are linking from. It is important to check this from time to time and disavow low quality websites. This is a process where you indicate that the link should be considered non-existent. And thus, no value assigned by Google. This is important because low quality links can have a negative effect on your website. And therefore better to be considered non-existent.

You can initiate this by collecting the bad links and sending them to Google, this can be done using the following tool within Google Search Console:

https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links

After that, it's just a matter of waiting to see if it will be removed. This is Google's responsibility to arrange and unfortunately cannot be forced.

Backlinks and quality

Google refers to buying links to your website as a black hat tactic, so in their eyes it is not allowed or beneficial to buy links to your website. However, in practice, this has been difficult to implement. This is because purchased links can also be hidden as guest posts and sponsored content. These are tactics you can use to get backlinks to your site in a more honest way. And are available in various places and marketplaces on the internet. One tactic that is easier for Google to track is link exchange, which is the exchange of links between websites. This is also called non-natural links and can be given a negative score. Link swapping is also not as valuable as it used to be.

The quality of a backlink is therefore more important than ever and can be taken into account once websites start linking to you. So pay attention to this as well, it doesn't have to be done every week. But for example once every six months you can take inventory and determine what has value. If you need help with this, you can also take a look at our SEO services at our partner MijnWebdesignPartner.nl. Here we can help you with all your SEO work.