What's the best way to count incoming links?

• I have a question about counting incoming links. It seems that every tool we use reports a different number. Can you help us figure out the best way to count links?

Answer:

Trying to figure out exactly how many incoming links a site has can be a frustrating experience. As you said, it depends on what report you're looking at.

In fact, a while back ago, this question was put to Google's John Mueller who tweeted out the following insights...

Hi @JohnMu, how accurate is the Internal links report in GSC? The number of links:

* is just a random sample?
* is it delayed compared to actual date?

I can see huge differences between my own crawls and GSC's data. Eg. a URL has millions of incoming links, GSC show 40K.

— Linki (@LinkiCZ) July 22, 2022

As the discussion continued, John added this to his previous post...

Don't focus on the number of links any particular tool shows -- there is no "correct" way to count links, interpretations vary wildly. Think of links as a way that people can reach your site, not as a metric of its own. The number of links any tool shows is not a ranking factor.

— johnmu (@JohnMu) July 22, 2022

It's important to know that link counting only provides relative numbers — relative to the site you are comparing to when using the same tool to assess each site.

And, like John said, "The number of links any tool shows is not a ranking factor" —...