What does the External Links report tell me?

Links > External links is Google's own view of who links to you. It is first-party data, which no third-party crawler can match for authority, and it is a sample rather than a complete index, which is why it should never be used as a link count.

The three tables

• Top linked pages - your pages ordered by how many external links point at them. The number counts linking pages, and a second column counts the distinct sites those pages sit on.
• Top linking sites - the domains that link to you most often. Clicking a domain opens the specific pages of yours it links to, and drilling again shows example source URLs.
• Top linking text - the anchor text used in links to your site, aggregated across the whole property, not per page.

Each table opens into a fuller list, and exports are capped at 1,000 rows.

What the report will not tell you

• Whether a link is followed. nofollow, sponsored and ugc links appear here with no distinction from ordinary ones.
• When a link appeared or disappeared. There are no dates and no history, so link growth has to be tracked by exporting on a schedule and comparing.
• Whether a link still exists. Data lags, and links can persist in the report after the source page has changed.
• That disavowed links are gone. A disavow file changes how Google treats links, not whether they are listed.
• Anything through an API. Links data is not exposed by the Search Console API, unlike performance data and URL inspection, so exports have to be done by hand.

Tip: read this report for direction rather than volume. A page of yours that appears near the top of Top linked pages but ranks poorly is usually the highest-value internal linking target on the site, since the authority is already there.

For internal links, which is a separate section of the same report, see internal links. For the practical walkthrough, see checking backlinks.

How AutoPSEO helps

AutoPSEO concentrates on the data Search Console reports best, search performance and indexing, and lets you export any table to CSV so it can be joined with link data from a crawler or backlink tool. Where a link API does exist, it is used: with a Bing Webmaster key connected, inbound link counts come through the Bing integration. See Bing Webmaster Tools.