Guide
Four things worth checking about any link you have been promised, and the free ways to check each one.
Written by AxelonLast updated
The short answer
Open the page, right-click and choose View Page Source, then search for your domain. If it appears inside an href, the link is live. Check the same code for rel="nofollow", "sponsored" or "ugc". To see whether Google can see the page, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. Recheck every month or two, because links do disappear.
Open the page the link should be on, right-click and choose View Page Source, then press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for your domain. If it appears inside something like href="https://yoursite.com", the link is there. Checking the page source rather than the page you see matters: it shows what a search engine receives, not what a browser builds afterwards.
Then it is being added by JavaScript after the page loads. Google says links added this way can still be crawled if they use a normal a element with an href, but not every crawler runs JavaScript, and some link checkers will not see it at all. If the link matters to you, ask the site owner to put it in the page itself.
In the same page source, look at the link’s code. If it contains rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc", the link is marked. If there is no rel, or it only says something like noopener or noreferrer, it is a normal link. Noopener and noreferrer are about browser security and have nothing to do with SEO.
Sources: Google: qualify your outbound linksGoogle: evolving nofollow (2019)
Search Google for site: followed by the page address. If it appears, the page is indexed. If you own the linking site, the URL Inspection tool in Search Console gives a definite answer and can show you the HTML Google received. A link on a page Google has not indexed is not doing much yet.
Google Search Console has a free Links report that lists the sites linking to you and your most linked pages. It is authoritative for your own site but updates slowly, so a new link can take weeks to appear. Paid tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush have bigger crawls and update faster.
Most often for boring reasons: the page was redesigned, the article was updated, the site moved to a new platform, or a plugin changed how links are written. Sometimes a site owner quietly removes links they agreed to. Either way, a link that was live once is not guaranteed to be live forever.
Every month or two for links you care about, and after any big change on the linking site. Keep a simple list: the page, the date it went live, and whether it was followed. It takes a few minutes and catches problems before they matter.
A link through a short redirect to your site usually still works for readers, and search engines generally follow simple redirects. Links that go through tracking or affiliate redirect services are less reliable, and many are marked sponsored anyway. A direct link to your page is always the safest version.
Coming to AnyBacklink. We’re building a backlink checker into AnyBacklink. Until then, the free methods above are the most reliable way to check. Every swap agreed on AnyBacklink is already checked when both sides confirm their link is published.
On AnyBacklink, both sides of a swap submit the page their link is on, and it is checked before the swap counts. Free, and nothing is bought or sold.