What Is the Links Report in Google Search Console?
Half of this report is about what other sites do, which you cannot control. The other half is about how your own site links to itself, which you control entirely and almost nobody looks at. That second half is where the value is.
What This Report Actually Is
A view of what links to your site from elsewhere and how your site links to itself, reported by Google rather than estimated by anybody. Links are the subject in this industry most cluttered with paid tools and confident claims, so a free view from the source is worth understanding properly.
The two halves. External and internal.
Other people's sites pointing at yours, plus your own pages pointing at each other. Different in what they tell you and completely different in what you can do about them.
Where the data comes from. What Google has found.
Not a model of the web, not an estimate and not a sample of a sample. What Google itself has recorded, which is why it disagrees with everything else and why it is the version we trust.
What it is not. A task list.
This is the misunderstanding that costs businesses most on this subject. The report describes a situation. Almost nothing in the external half calls for any action at all.
Why the internal half gets ignored. It sounds boring.
External links are the glamorous half, which is why they attract the tools and the sales calls. Internal links are unglamorous, entirely within your control and consistently the better return.
What it will not tell you. Anybody else's links.
Like everything in this tool, it reports on properties you control. Competitor link research is a job for paid platforms. We do not name any of those anywhere on this site.
How we use it. Bottom up.
We read the internal view for the pages with the fewest links rather than the most, which is where the fixable problems are. Block five is that method in full.
Checking Your Backlinks
The external view shows sites linking to you, which of your pages they point at and roughly how much each source contributes. It is genuinely useful and it is a sample rather than a complete inventory, which matters for how you read it.
What a sample means here. Not everything is listed.
You are seeing a representative view rather than every link that exists. So the absence of a link from the report is not proof that it does not exist.
Why the counts disagree with other sources. Different measurements.
Everything else in this field builds its own picture of the web by crawling independently, then estimates. Those numbers were never going to match a report of what Google recorded. Neither figure is wrong.
Which number to believe. This one, for your site.
Where the two disagree about whether Google knows of a link, this report is the source. External tools are useful for looking at anybody's site, including your competitors, which is the job this report cannot do.
What to read it for. Direction, not totals.
Whether the number of referring sites is growing over a year, plus which kinds of sites they are. A single month tells you almost nothing.
What to do when it is empty. Nothing dramatic.
A newer or smaller site with very few referring domains is in an ordinary position rather than a broken one. Buying links to fill it is the single fastest way to turn a modest profile into a genuine problem.
What good looks like. Boringly relevant.
Trade bodies, suppliers, local organisations, publications in your field and businesses you have genuinely worked with. Where link building belongs is our backlinks material rather than this page.
Do Not Panic About What You See
Every site of any age has links from places it never asked for. Directories nobody has heard of, scraped copies of its own pages, forums in other languages and sites that appear to exist for no reason. That is entirely normal and it is not a problem to solve.
Where they come from. The ordinary web.
Automated aggregators, content scrapers, abandoned directories and pages that copied a list from somewhere else. Nobody targeted you and nothing was done to you.
What Google does with them. Usually ignores them.
Search engines have dealt with low quality linking for a very long time and are considerably better at discounting it than at being fooled by it. Ordinary junk is background noise.
Why this matters commercially. Fear sells.
An export of odd looking links makes a persuasive attachment to a proposal for cleanup work. That work is nearly always unnecessary. We have seen businesses spend real money removing links that were doing nothing at all.
When it is genuinely worth attention. Narrow circumstances.
Essentially where something deliberate has been done, either by a previous supplier or against you, usually alongside a stated problem elsewhere in the reporting. Our risky practices material owns that question and the position on disavow.
How to tell fear from evidence. Ask what changed.
Odd links plus stable performance is background noise. Odd links plus a stated problem in the manual actions reporting is a different conversation. That reporting is where the evidence would be.
What to do in the meantime. Nothing.
Look at the external half twice a year for direction and leave the rest alone. That is a legitimate strategy rather than negligence.
Top Linked Pages
The report will tell you which of your pages other sites reference most. Those are frequently not the pages the business promotes. The gap between the two lists is information about what you are actually valued for.
What usually tops the list. Something unexpected.
A technical explainer, an old article answering a specific question, a resource somebody found useful. Rarely the service pages the business spends its money on.
What that tells you. Your reputation, from outside.
People link to what they found worth citing. That is an external judgement about where your expertise is visible, which is worth more than an internal opinion about it.
What to do with a strong page. Look after it.
Keep it current, make sure it leads somewhere commercial and do not quietly delete it during a redesign. Pages like this get lost in rebuilds constantly.
What it says about your best work. It is already proven.
A page other sites chose to reference has passed a test nothing on your own site can administer. Treat that list as evidence of what your business is credible about rather than as a curiosity.
The redesign warning. Check this list first.
Before any migration, take the list of most referenced pages and make sure every one of them survives or redirects properly. Those are the addresses carrying the most weight.
What a thin list means. You are not being cited.
Where almost nothing external points at any of your pages, the site has published plenty and produced nothing anybody wanted to reference. That is a content finding rather than a link building brief.
What to do with the pattern. Write more of that.
Where a particular kind of page attracts references, that is a strategy the market has already validated. Our material on improving content covers acting on it.
Checking Internal Links
This shows how your site links to itself. It is the most actionable thing in the report by a wide margin. External links depend on other people. Internal links are entirely yours, which makes this the cheapest improvement available anywhere in search.
What internal links are doing. Declaring importance.
A page linked from your navigation and from a dozen other pages has been declared central. A page linked from nothing has been declared irrelevant, whatever you intended.
Why that matters practically. Two effects.
It affects whether Google bothers to fetch and store a page. It also affects how much standing that page inherits from the rest of your site. Both are real and both are free to influence.
How to read the view. From the bottom.
Sort by the fewest links rather than the most. The top of that list is where your problems are and the bottom is where your best pages already sit.
The comparison that produces the finding. Against commercial value.
Put the pages with fewest internal links next to the pages that make you money. Where those overlap, you have found something worth an afternoon.
What we see most often. Service pages starved.
Blog articles heavily linked from each other while the pages that actually sell something are reachable only from the main menu. That is extremely common and straightforward to correct.
What not to do about it. Add links everywhere.
A block of thirty links in a footer is not internal linking. Neither is a paragraph stuffed with them. Links belong where a reader would plausibly want to follow one, which is a writing decision rather than a technical one.
Where the standards live. The on-page material.
How to link, what to link and where links belong within a page sits in our on-page guidance rather than here.
Orphaned And Under-Linked Pages
A page nothing points at is effectively hidden. It may be perfectly good, it may have taken a week to write and as far as your own site is concerned it does not matter. Finding these is a twenty minute job with a straightforward fix.
How pages end up orphaned. Nobody decided.
A redesign dropped the link, a menu was simplified, a category page was removed or the page was published without anybody adding it anywhere. All accidents rather than choices.
How to spot them here. The bottom of the internal list.
Pages with one link or none. Cross reference against your sitemap or your own inventory, since a page nothing links to may not appear prominently in this view either.
What it looks like elsewhere. An indexing message.
Under-linked pages frequently show up as known about and never fetched, which the indexing errors guide covers. Same problem, different report.
The fix. Link to it from somewhere that matters.
Not a footer full of links. One or two links from pages that already perform, placed where a reader would genuinely want them.
How long the fix takes to show. Weeks, not days.
The link has to be found, the page revisited and the assessment redone. That is the ordinary pace of everything in this tool, so add the links and look again next month rather than next week.
What to do with pages you cannot justify linking. Ask why they exist.
If no page on your site has a natural reason to point at it, that is worth thinking about before you engineer a link to it.
Anchor Text, Briefly
The report shows the words people used as the clickable text of links to your site. That is descriptive information rather than a target to optimise. The distinction matters more than it sounds.
What it tells you. How you are described.
Frequently your business name, sometimes the page title and occasionally something that reveals what people think you do. Reading it is interesting and acting on it rarely is.
Why it is not a target. You do not control it.
Somebody else wrote it. Attempting to engineer what other sites say about you means asking people to use particular phrasing, which is exactly the sort of arrangement that gets sites into trouble.
What a manufactured pattern looks like. Suspiciously consistent.
Dozens of links using the same commercially valuable phrase. A natural profile is messy, repetitive in dull ways and full of your own name.
Where you can be deliberate. Your own links.
Internal anchor text is yours to write. The standard is simply describing where the link goes. That is good writing rather than optimisation.
One thing worth checking. Your own name.
If almost nothing links to you using your business name, you are less established than the site suggests. That is a marketing observation rather than a search one and it is worth noticing.
What to do with the information. Almost nothing.
Read it once a year out of interest. There is no action available on the external side and the internal side is a writing standard rather than a report to work through.
Where the risk position lives. Our risky practices material.
What crosses the line on links and anchors is covered there. Everything on this tool sits on the Google Search Console guide.
Your best page
might be linked
from nowhere
at all.
External links depend on other people and take months. Internal links are free, immediate and within your control. The pages that sell for you are frequently the ones your own site points at least. Reading that view from the bottom rather than the top is where the work is.
What we look at here:
If somebody has sent you a list of toxic links and a price for removing them, ask what evidence there is that any of it is doing harm.
Every guide.
One tool.
Getting set up and verified, using the reports properly, the performance and indexing data, finding what is broken, finding what is being passed over and turning any of it into work worth doing.
