Search Console Links Report: How to Use It for SEO

The Search Console Links report shows which sites link to you, which of your pages get the most links, what anchor text people use, and how your own pages link to each other. It is free, it comes straight from Google, and it answers most everyday link questions without a paid tool.

The catch is that it shows a sample, not every link, and it leaves out some details you might expect. In this guide I’ll show you how to read each part of the report, what it can’t tell you, and the checks I run with it.

What the Search Console Links Report Shows

The report sits in the left menu of Search Console, under Links, near the bottom. When you open it, you see one page split into two halves: external links and internal links.

An external link (often called a backlink) is a link on another website that points to a page on your site. An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another page on the same site.

The landing page has four main tables:

• Top linked pages (external): your pages that get the most links from other sites.
• Top linking sites: the domains that link to you the most.
• Top linking text: the most common anchor text (the clickable words of a link) used in external links.
• Top linked pages (internal): your pages that get the most links from your own pages.

Each table shows a short preview. Click More under any of them to see the full table, which goes up to 1,000 rows.

How Google Counts and Groups the Data

This part confuses many people, so it’s worth a minute. Google cleans up the data before it shows it to you.

• Pages are grouped by canonical URL. A canonical URL is the version of a page Google treats as the main one. Links to duplicate versions are counted under that main version.
• Duplicate links are merged. If the same page links to the same target more than once, it counts as one.
• Sites are grouped by root domain. Links from blog.example.com and www.example.com both show as example.com.
• Country endings stay separate. example.com and example.co.uk are listed as two different sites.

Google’s Links report help page also says the report can include links it found in the past that may no longer exist. So a link you know was removed might still show for a while.

How to Use the External Links Tables

The external half is where most people spend their time. Each table answers a different question, so I look at them in a set order.

Top Linked Pages: Which Pages Earn Links

This table lists your pages by the number of external links they get. You can sort by incoming links or by linking sites. I always sort by linking sites, because one site with 500 sitewide footer links can make a page look far more popular than it is.

Click any URL to see which sites link to that page. Then click a site to see the exact pages on that site that hold the links.

Here is what I look for in this table:

• Pages that earn links naturally. If a guide or tool page keeps picking up links, that tells you what kind of content your market finds useful. Make more of it.
• Linked pages that are weak or out of date. A page with many links but thin content is a good page to update, because it already has the trust it needs to rank.
• Linked pages that no longer exist. If a URL that returns a 404 error still has links, redirect it to the closest live page so those links are not wasted.
• Your home page share. On most small business sites, the home page gets most links. That is normal. It just means your inner pages depend on internal links to pass that value along.

When you drill into a page, you may see a column called Target URL (if different). If it has a value, either the link points to a URL that redirects, or Google picked a different canonical for that page. It’s a quick way to spot links that land on old URLs.

Top Linking Sites: Who Links to You

This table lists the domains that link to you, sorted by how many links they send. Click a domain to see which of your pages it links to.

In my experience, the top of this list often has a few odd entries. Scraper sites, directories and auto-generated pages copy content and links all the time. Seeing them here is normal and, on its own, not a problem.

The more useful checks are these:

1. Scan the list for sites you know and trust: partners, suppliers, local press, industry groups. Make sure the links you earned actually show up.
2. Look for real sites in your industry that link to a competitor but not to you. This report can’t show competitor links, but it reminds you who is already in your corner.
3. Note any domain with a huge number of links compared with others. Click it to see if it’s a sitewide link in a footer or sidebar.
4. Flag domains you don’t recognise and open one or two of their linking pages to see what they are.

Top Linking Text: What Anchor Text Says About You

This table shows the most common words people use when they link to you. Matching is exact but not case-sensitive, so “Blue Shoes” and “blue shoes” count as one. Links with no text, such as image links with no alt text, show as (empty).

A healthy list usually includes your brand name, your domain, plain phrases like “this guide” or “website”, and some topic words. That mix is what natural linking looks like.

Two things make me look closer:

• Lots of exact keyword anchors, like a money phrase repeated across many sites. That pattern often points to paid or swapped links, which go against Google’s guidelines on link schemes.
• Anchor text in a language or topic that has nothing to do with you, such as gambling or pharmacy terms. That can be a sign of spam, or in worse cases, a hacked page on your own site that others are linking to.

You can’t edit anchor text on other sites. But when you ask for a link, for example from a partner or a supplier, you can suggest text that describes the page clearly.

How to Use the Internal Links Table

I think the internal links table is the most underused part of the report. You fully control internal links, so every finding here is something you can fix today.

The table lists your pages by how many internal links point to them. Click a page to see which of your pages link to it.

Check Your Key Pages Get Enough Internal Links

Start with a short list of the pages that matter most to the business: main service pages, top product categories, your best guides. Then find them in this table.

If a key page sits far down the list, or has only a handful of internal links, Google and users have a hard time reaching it. I’d fix that before chasing any new backlinks.

Useful fixes include:

• Adding a link to the page from your main menu or a hub page.
• Linking to it from related blog posts with clear, descriptive anchor text.
• Adding it to a “related” block on pages in the same topic.

Spot Pages That Get Too Many Internal Links

The top of this table is usually your home page and pages in the menu and footer. That’s fine.

What I watch for is a low-value page near the top. Login pages, tag archives, cart pages or old promo pages sometimes get a link from every page through a template. That spreads your internal links thin. If a page doesn’t need to be in the menu or footer, take it out.

Find Pages With No Internal Links

Pages that don’t appear in this table at all may have no internal links. These are often called orphan pages, and Google may struggle to find or value them.

The report won’t list orphan pages for you, so I do it this way:

1. Export the internal top linked pages table.
2. Get a list of all your important URLs from your XML sitemap.
3. Compare the two lists in a spreadsheet.
4. Any important URL in the sitemap but missing from the export needs internal links.

Keep in mind the table caps at 1,000 rows, and very large sites may not see every page. For those sites, a site crawler gives a fuller picture of internal links.

How to Export Links From Search Console

Exports are where the report becomes truly useful, because you can sort, filter and compare the data in a spreadsheet.

There are two kinds of export:

• Single table exports. Open any full table and click Export at the top. You can download a CSV or Excel file, or send it to Google Sheets. These exports include the rows in that table.
• External links export. On the Links report landing page, click Export external links at the top right. You get two choices: More sample links, which is a larger sample from all the links Google knows about, and Latest links, which shows the most recently found links.

The external links export gives you far more rows than the 1,000-row tables, and it lists the actual linking page URLs. That’s the file I use for any real link review.

My habit is to save a Latest links export about once a month, with the date in the file name. Search Console doesn’t show a history or trend chart for links, so these saved files become your own record. Comparing two months side by side shows you new linking sites quickly.

What the Links Report Doesn’t Tell You

Knowing the gaps saves you from wrong conclusions. Here is what’s missing:

• It’s a sample. Google is clear that the report doesn’t list every link. Pages that aren’t indexed, or URLs that were merged as duplicates, may be left out.
• No nofollow flag. A nofollow link carries a tag that asks Google not to pass ranking credit. The report doesn’t show which links have it, so you can’t tell from the report alone which links count.
• No quality or authority score. Google doesn’t rate the links here. A count of 50 links says nothing about whether they help you.
• No lost links list. You won’t get an alert when a link goes away. Saved exports are the only way to track this in Search Console.
• No trend over time. The main tables don’t show when each link was first found or how totals change by month.
• Your property type matters. Google treats anything outside your current property as external. If you use a URL-prefix property for https://www.example.com, links from your own blog.example.com may show as external. A Domain property gives a cleaner picture.

For a deeper dig into competitors or link quality, third-party link tools fill some of these gaps. But for your own site, I still trust Google’s own sample as the starting point, because it shows links Google actually knows about.

Spammy Links, the Disavow Tool and When to Leave It Alone

Seeing strange domains in the Links report scares a lot of site owners. In most cases, there is nothing to do.

Google says most sites don’t need to disavow anything, because its systems can usually work out which links to trust. Its help page on disavowing links says to use the tool only if you have a large number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links, and they have caused or are likely to cause a manual action. A manual action is a penalty a Google reviewer applies to a site, and it shows up in the Manual actions report in Search Console.

My rule of thumb is simple:

1. If you have no manual action and you never bought or traded links, leave the random spam alone.
2. If you did buy links or run a link scheme in the past, try to get those links removed at the source first.
3. Only if that fails, and the problem is large, build a disavow file from your Links report export.

A few points from Google’s guidance are easy to miss. Disavowed links still show in the Links report, so don’t expect them to disappear. The tool works with URL-prefix properties, not Domain properties. And uploading a new file replaces the old one, so always keep your full list in one file.

I’d only use disavow with care. Disavowing good links by mistake can hurt you more than leaving a few spam links in place.

A Simple Monthly Links Review

You don’t need to check the Links report every day. Links change slowly, and the data updates over time. Once a month is enough for most sites.

This is the review I run:

1. Export Latest links and save it with the date.
2. Compare with last month’s file to spot new linking sites. Thank partners, and note any press or mentions you earned.
3. Check top linked pages for any linked URL that now returns an error, and redirect it.
4. Scan top linking text for spam terms or topics that don’t fit your site.
5. Review internal links for your five to ten most important pages, and add links where they’re thin.
6. Write down one action for the month, such as updating a well-linked but weak page.

If something looks wrong with a specific page, the URL Inspection tool and its API help you check whether Google has indexed it and which canonical it chose.

Common Mistakes I See With the Links Report

• Treating the total as your real link count. It’s a sample, so the number will never match a third-party tool, and that’s fine.
• Panicking over spam domains. Random spam is normal for any site that has been online for a while.
• Ignoring the internal links half. It’s the part you can act on fastest.
• Not saving exports. Without them, you have no history to compare against.
• Checking the wrong property. Make sure you’re looking at the property that covers your whole site, or numbers will look odd.

Conclusion: Make the Search Console Links Report a Habit

The Search Console Links report won’t give you every link, but it gives you Google’s own view of who links to you, what text they use, and how well your pages link to each other. Used once a month with saved exports, it covers most of what a small or mid-sized site needs.

Your next step: open the internal links table and check your most important pages first. If you find well-linked pages that are weak or outdated, my guide on how to audit your site for unhelpful content will help you decide what to improve. And if you want the bigger picture for the rest of the year, see the SEO checklist for 2022.