backlinks-check

Backlinks Check — are links from donor pages live and do they pass link equity?

The presence of an <a href> is not enough. A link does not pass link equity if it uses rel=nofollow (or ugc/sponsored), if the donor page is blocked from indexing with meta robots noindex, if it applies nofollow to all links at once, or if it is canonicalized to another URL. The tool checks all of these conditions and groups the results by cause.

Important scope boundary: this checks your list of donor pages (purchased links, crowd-marketing links, guest posts, directories); it does not investigate someone else's backlink profile. External databases (Ahrefs, Majestic, GSC) are not available here; a request to "show every link to the site" requires one of them.

The tool is seohead backlinks-check (CLI + MCP seo_backlinks_check + HTTP).

When to use it

• "check my backlinks," "are the links still live," "was the link removed";
• "dofollow or nofollow," "does it pass link equity";
• "does page X link to our site";
• regular monitoring of purchased backlinks.

Workflow

Target: a domain (any link to the domain or one of its subdomains will match):

seohead backlinks-check --target example.com --donors "https://donor1.example/post,https://donor2.example/page"

Target: an exact URL (the address must match exactly):

seohead backlinks-check --target https://example.com/landing --donors-file donors.txt

--donors-file is a file containing one URL per line, with # marking comments. --concurrency N is the number of parallel requests (default: 3; maximum: 10). The limit is 500 donor pages per run.

Response contents

• summary: found (link exists), missing (link is absent), dofollow, nofollow, on_noindex_page (the donor page is blocked from indexing, so no equity is passed).
• results[] for each donor page: found, status_code, donor_indexable, canonical/canonical_elsewhere, links[] (for every link found: href, anchor, rel, follow, blocked_by), and reason, which explains why the link is absent or why it does not work.