How to Validate Backlinks? (4 Simple Methods)

Businesses allocate an average of 28% of their SEO budget to get links to their site.

Considering the SEO market size estimate of roughly $80 billion annually, backlinks are a huge investment and asset.

Link building is a massive industry. There’s a broad spectrum, from digital PR agencies placing your business on the most reputable websites to the cheapest Fiverr freelancers selling useless links at $50 per thousand links.

But how do you validate the new links from these link providers? How do you check their work?

Here are a few ways to go about it.

N.B. If you need to check your internal links rather than backlinks, see our Link Discovery Guide.

#1. Use Our Backlinks Verification Tool 

The best approach is to use a special tool to validate the backlinks.

There aren’t many tools out there. So we’ve built our own one.

You need to enter your domain name and the list of URLs linking to your site. 

The tool validates whether these URLs exist and links to your domain are live.

We have also prepared an overview table where you can track and monitor these links from time to time.

You can check out our tool here for free.

#2. Manually Check the Links

Another simple method to check the new links is manually checking the URLs.

The link builders provide you with the URLs that have linked to your site. All you need to do is click on the URLs and check them.

Here is how to do it:

Step1. Click on the URL you want to check.

Step 2. Right-click (or two-finger click on Mac) and go to “View Page Source”

Step 3. Search for your domain name.

To search, enter Ctrl+F (or ⌘+F on Mac) and type in your domain name.

Step 4. Check for no-follow

If a rel=”nofollow” tag accompanies the link to your domain name, then the link is no-follow. The absence of a no-follow tag means the link is do-follow.

You ideally want a do-follow link.

That’s how you check the link directly from the given URL.

Now, there are both pros and cons to this approach.

Pros: Simple and easy way to validate the backlinks.

Cons: Time-consuming if the list of URLs is long.

#3. Wait for SEO Tools to Show the Links

Another alternative is waiting for SEO tools to show these links.

The best SEO tool for backlink discovery is Semrush, followed by Ahrefs. Moz and Majestic also have this feature yet their performance is lower. 

These SEO tools list out the backlinks for your website.

In addition, they show whether the link is active and whether it is do-follow or no-follow. You can filter these links as New, Active, or Lost. Here is an example from Semrush:

Ahrefs is showing similar data:

The only drawback is that these SEO tools take time to discover the links. And not all links are discovered by these tools.

We actually tested how fast these SEO tools discover backlinks and which of them discovers the most links. Here is our research on the best backlink-checking tool.

Apart from SEO tools, you can also check the backlinks from Google Search Console. Again, you will run into the same problem. Not all links are reflected in the Search Console.

Here are the pros and cons of using SEO tools to check links:

Pros: Hassle-free and automatic

Cons: It takes weeks to discover the links. Not all links are reflected.

#4. Use Screaming Frog to Validate the Links

Most SEOs use Screaming Frog to validate and track backlinks.

Screaming Frog is a website crawler SEO tool primarily used for website auditing.

You can check and validate new links to your site using Screaming Frog. To do so, you need to use their Custom Extraction feature. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1. Open Screaming Frog SEO Spider and switch to List Mode.

Step 2. Go to – Configuration > Custom > Custom Extraction

Step 3.  Input XPath Rules in the Custom Extraction dialog box:

Here’s what you need to input:

Extractor 1 (Link) => //a[contains(@href, xamsor.com’)]/@href 

Extractor 2 (Anchor) => //a[contains(@href, xamsor.com’)] 

Extractor 3 (Link rel attribute) => //a[contains(@href, xamsor.com’)]/@rel

Replace xamsor.com with the site name you are checking links for.

Step 4. Upload the URLs

Go to – Upload > Enter Manually

Now paste the URL list.

Next, click OK to start the crawl.

Step 5. Go to – “Custom Extraction” tab to see the results.

As you can see, the process is quite complicated if you are not familiar with Screaming Frog.

Here are the pros and cons of this approach:

Pros: Accurate check and faster than manual checking.

Cons: Not beginner-friendly. If you are not familiar with the tool, it feels complicated.

Wrapping Up

Most people use manual checking to validate the new links to their site. While this method works great for checking a few links, it becomes time-consuming when the list gets long.

SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can automatically discover backlinks while crawling the web. However, these tools do not discover links fast and do not discover them all.

Screaming Frog is the to-go for many SEOs, but the process is complicated, and the validation process is not beginner-friendly.

I’ve built a small yet sophisticated tool to validate the list of backlinks and report on them. Feel free to try it!