The Challenge of Finding Backlinks
I recently stumbled upon blog posts by Herbert Lui (How to find people who link to your blog) and Maddy Miller (I wish reply articles worked better; see also my reply post) discussing some of the challenges in engaging in website-to-website discussions. Both blog posts noted that it can be difficult to find where other websites discuss your published writing and media. They also note that it can be difficult to make people you link to aware of those links. The latter post discussed implementing Webmentions, which I have enabled both here and more robustly on The Emu Café Social, but Webmentions only “works” for the small number of websites that have implemented it. These recent posts reminded me that Joel Chrono wrote about manually maintaining a page of links to his site and discussed the various methods he uses to find those links (Webmentions but manual (for Jekyll)).
As a fan of site-to-site conversations, I agree in the main with the three posts I cited to above in that external links are good, and that actually finding and collecting them can be difficult. Over the years, I have cobbled together links to my writing from around the world wide web and am in the process of working on a good way to display them. In this article, I will go through some of the various methods I have used to collect external links to my articles. None of these methods require webmasters to install anything on their sites, but some are dependent on external accounts and the websites in questions being indexed.
Webmaster Tools
Google, Bing, and Yandex Search all offer Webmaster Tools (Google has taken to calling the Webmaster area “Google Search Console,” but I will use Webmaster for simplicity’s sake and also because it sounds cooler). In order to access Webmaster Tools for a specific domain or website, the webmaster must validate his or her website with Google, Bing, and/or Yandex. The particulars of the “validation” process are beyond the scope of this article, but it is well-documented and generally should not be difficult. Accessing these tools also requires an account, but as of the publication date of this article Bing and Yandex accept sign-in with a Google Search Console account for accessing their Webmaster tools.
Google, Bing, and Yandex all have a “links” area where you can view external links to pages and posts on your website. You can see the links areas in all three below:
There are limitations to the links tool in the Webmaster area. Firstly, your site must be indexed because the search engines will not return results for pages that are not in their respective indexes. For example, when New Leaf Journal was briefly and randomly de-indexed by Bing in 2023, Bing’s links tool was wholly useless to me. Secondly, they do not find every link. As of the publication date of this article, New Leaf Journal is well-indexed by Google, Bing, and Yandex, but Google shows far more links than the latter two, making it the most useful to me. With that being said, I have found a couple of non-spam links in Yandex that I did not find in Google or Bing.
If you are running your own website, I recommend validating it with Google as well as Bing and Yandex if you happen to be in the area, unless you are blocking any or all of those search engines from indexing your site. Even if you do not care at all about search engine or visitor traffic, the links tool and several other tools (e.g., highlighting potential technical issues with pages such as missing alt text on images) can be useful. For those of you who are interested in search but are not fans of the big tech players, it is worth noting that many “alternative search engines” such as DuckDuckGo rely on Google’s or Bing’s index (Bing in the case of DuckDuckGo).
I am aware that China’s Baidu offers Webmaster Tools, and it is possible that some other search engines may offer useful tools for validated websites (I have Webmaster Tools for Czech-based Seznam and briefly had Webmaster Tools for Naver, but they do not come with links functionality). However, I am not aware of any search engine that offers an English-language suite comparable to Google, Bing, and Yandex.
Backlink Checkers
There are various search engine optimization (“SEO”) and website marketing services which crawl the web, collect links, and catalog backlinks around the web. Unfortunately, full access to these services’ backlink checkers are limited to paying customers. But, fortunately, they tend to display a limited number of backlinks for a specific domain or webpage for free. While the free selection is limited, it has led me to links to my articles.
The one I have consulted most often is Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker. Ahrefs has a very active web crawler (they tout themselves as having the web’s second-biggest index behind Google), which it has also put to use as the basis of a free search engine called Yep. While the free version of Ahrefs Backlink Checker is limited (and has become more limited it recent months), it shows a decent number of links along with ratings for the quality of those links. It previously showed what I would consider to be some “spammy” backlinks to NLJ, but these days it does show some of our “better” backlinks in the free window.
Similar to Ahrefs, Neil Patel offers a Backlink Checker which shows a good number of links for free (it consistently shows some older backlinks to NLJ).
The other services in Ahrefs’ niche such as Semrush and Moz do not offer free sign-up or free backlink checks. However, there are services that do show a limited number of backlinks from the big players’ indexes without requiring payment or signing up. I am disinclined to share a list since I assume these services come and go, but I will note that as of the publication date of this article, SEO Review Tools shows 100 backlinks for a domain from SemRush for free. A quick search for “backlink checker” will turn up many other options.
Marginalia Search Backlinks
Marginalia Search is a free and open source search engine with an independent index created by its own web crawler. It focuses on small-web and vintage sites, but many modern websites are included in its index. There is much to recommend it as a search engine – I have used it as a research tool in numerous New Leaf Journal articles to dig up results that would be overlooked by the big players. But of interest to the issue at hand is Marginalia’s backlink checker. For any domain that Marginalia is (A) aware of and (B) has indexed, it is possible to see backlinks to that domain that Marginalia has indexed and catalogued.
In order to find a domain’s backlinks, step one is to search for the domain in Marginalia’s View Site Information search and then navigate to Backlinks. I explained how Marginalia Search’s backlink checker works along with some of its other tools in a full article titled Using Marginalia Search’s Backlink Search.
Speaking only for New Leaf Journal, Marginalia is not aware of as many backlinks as the three major English-language search engines with full Webmaster tools, but it has a good collection and a few that would be easy to miss on the bigger lists. The backlinks are not as well organized as on Google, Bing, and Yandex, but they are still easy enough to peruse. Marginalia may be more likely to turn up small-web and blog backlinks than the big players and it is a valuable free, open source, and privacy-friendly backlink checker with no sign-up or payment required.
Website Analytics
Many websites use on-site analytics. The most common is Google Analytics, but there are numerous other options in the space, many of which are more privacy-friendly (it is relative, of course) and some of which are self-hostable. Here on The New Leaf Journal, we use a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics, which runs entirely locally and functions (as I set it up with cookies disabled) largely as a page-hit tracker. I also used a similar WordPress solution called Statify for several months in 2025. Most analytics tools, including my simple free version of Koko Analytics, track referrers where possible. By referrer, I mean information about where a specific visitor came from. Referrer data is hit-and-miss and sometimes less than instructive. For example, an absolute majority of my recorded NLJ referrals are from Google Search, which obviously does not provide any insight into where I may have been linked to on the other site. However, some sites, or in some cases specific URLs, may appear as a referrer in analytics logs (one advantage of Statify is that it provided more detailed referrer data than Koko Analytics, albeit with some database size trade-offs). In this way, referrer data picked up by an analytics solution may sometimes lead a visitor to backlinks.
Webmasters who have access to their server logs may also study the logs to glean more information about backlinks, although server log data will generally be subject to the same limitations as analytics solutions.
Google’s (Former) :link Command
Google Search once supported a “link” command through which one could find backlinks to a specific domain by searching for link:{domain}. I write in the past tense because Google dropped support for the link command in 2017. Despite :link no longer being one of Google’s officially supported commands, I had some luck with running a Google search for link:thenewleafjournal.com. I had no such luck with running it for The Emu Café Social, but it does appear to work to some extent in some cases. If you are checking for links to a site that is well-indexed by Google, it cannot hurt to try the former link command to see what comes up. You can also try searching for a domain or website name using various search engines, but I had the best results (relatively speaking) on Google.
Pingbacks, Webmentions, and the Like
Of course, in some cases you will be able to find the backlink in other ways. WordPress websites which accept pingbacks may automatically receive notification of a backlink (NLJ sends pingbacks but does not accept them, alas). A better solution is the IndieWeb project’s Webmentions, which can send and receive rich backlink data (NLJ both sends and receives Webmentions). In the case of The New Leaf Journal, you can try using our Webmention endpoint to send a backlink even if your website does not have native Webmention support.
Being Told By Person Who Linked to You
Perhaps the best way to be told about a backlink is by someone who linked to your website. I recently received a message from someone who shared a link to one of my projects on his blog. If you link to someone, it may be worth “reaching out” (as the annoying phrase goes) to share the relevant article and why you linked to it.
Conclusion
I made use of all of the methods I described in this article to collect information about backlinks to The New Leaf Journal. If you happen to have any additional ideas, please share in the Guestbook or drop a note directly.
