On 2 September 2026 we opened the «Links» report in Search Console for our own site. External links: 5,226. That is the figure people set in large type inside a sales deck.
One line below stood the second one: linking sites — five.
What follows is a breakdown of our own backlink profile: what the report shows, how to read it, and why the number of links turned out to be the least useful figure in it. Everything here comes from one free tool, and you can pull the same data for your site in ten minutes.
Five thousand links, five sources
The split across donors looks like this:
| Donor | Links |
|---|---|
| site 1 | 3,132 |
| site 2 | 1,645 |
| site 3 | 238 |
| site 4 | 129 |
| site 5 | 69 |
All five are sites from our portfolio. Each carries a developer signature in the footer, and the footer repeats on every page. A shop with three thousand pages produces three thousand links. One decision made once, and the counter runs into the thousands.
A detail worth noticing straight away: the five rows add up to 5,213, while the headline figure is 5,226. The console rounds and slices data differently in different views. So any number taken from there is an order of magnitude, not an exact ledger. The same applies to competitor profiles shown to you in presentations.
Google does not publish the formula, but its position is old and consistent: the source matters, not the row in a table. A thousand links from one domain is the same single vote repeated a thousand times in a footer. That is why the first metric of a profile is the number of referring domains, and the number of links sits last on the list. It is popular precisely because it is the biggest and the easiest to grow: one sitewide link from a large site beats a hundred separate agreements.
Five domains. That is our real result, and that is the figure to work with.
What a backlink audit actually checks
Six questions. The free report answers five of them; the sixth is about its limits.
1. Domains versus links. A ratio of 5,226 to 5 describes a profile assembled from a handful of large sources. A profile with 300 links from 120 domains looks more modest and is in fact stronger: 120 separate decisions by different people stand behind it.
2. Sitewide versus editorial. A sitewide link lives in the footer or a sidebar and repeats on every page of the donor. An editorial link sits inside the text, because someone referred to you on the merits. Our editorial count is zero. That is not a fault, it is a ceiling: five donors give five votes, no matter how many pages they add next year.
Telling one from the other is easy. Open two or three donor pages from the export and see where the link sits. The same position on every page means sitewide.
3. The anchors. Our four most frequent ones: «lionex digital agency», «lionex digital», «потрібен сайт lionex com ua», «lionex». All branded. There is good news and bad news in that. Good: the profile shows no signs of being bought — no commercial anchors like «order a cheap website», no junk from unrelated topics. Bad: from that set a search engine learns only what we are called, and nothing about what we do.
4. Where they point. All 5,226 point at the homepage. Not a single link to a service page or an article. That is a typical developer signature and an accurate diagnosis at once: the profile was received, not earned. Earned links land unevenly, on a specific piece someone needed on a specific day.
5. What is missing. Directories, industry media, partner pages, mentions in roundups. Empty. This item reads as a list of work not yet done, and it is more useful than the first four.
6. What the report will not show. Worth saying plainly, because this is where paid services build their pitch. Search Console does not separate nofollow from ordinary links. It does not show lost links, the ones that existed and disappeared. It does not show links Google has not seen yet. And it updates with a delay of several days. For a first audit that is more than enough; for tracking change over time it is not.
There is a seventh question the report does not take on at all, and it is the cheapest of the lot: internal links. We have 2,454 of them. The homepage receives 238, the advertising section 226, SEO 225, development 215, the blog 214, and the free audit page 211. The distribution is even, deliberately: if everything arrives from outside onto the homepage, only internal linking spreads that weight further. How the same linking affects crawling is a separate breakdown with its own numbers: where a site's crawl budget goes.
How to pull the same data for your site
Search Console → «Links» in the left menu → the «External links» block → «Export external links» → «More sample links». You get a spreadsheet with three sheets: linked pages, linking sites, and anchors.
Then ten minutes of work:
- Count the rows on the sites sheet. That is your main figure. Not the sum of links — the row count.
- Look at the largest row. If one donor accounts for more than half of the total, you have one sitewide link, not hundreds of separate decisions.
- Read the anchors sheet. Look for anything that is neither your brand nor your topic: anchors in a foreign language, gambling, pharmacy, loans. That is a sign people are linking to you for reasons other than content.
- Look at the pages sheet. If everything points at the homepage, there is no outside interest in individual materials yet.
That is a backlink audit in its minimal form. It costs nothing and needs no paid service. The rest of the site checks done in the same day sit in a neighbouring breakdown: a site audit in one day. How the same things look inside someone else's profile is covered in the competitor breakdown.
What we do about it
We do not buy links and do not advise buying them. The reason is practical rather than moral: a bought link brings no visitor, the payments repeat monthly, and the risk sits on your domain, not the seller's.
A profile built from footer signatures is normal and honest for an agency — we did build those sites. But the ceiling is visible. What comes next: profiles in industry directories (Clutch, DOU, GoodFirms), a company page on LinkedIn, free tools as a reason to link, and articles with our own measurements instead of retold advice. The last one works more slowly than anything else and lasts the longest.
The context matters too, otherwise the numbers read wrong. The site has been in search for exactly one month: until 4 August 2026 it sat closed to indexing. Between 3 and 31 August it collected 5,656 impressions, 41 clicks and an average position of 39.3. The page shown most often, the SEO site audit, sits at 57.8 for the query «site audit». A thin link profile is one of the reasons, and not the main one: a single month in the index counts for more.
One more figure shows the scale of the task. For our own brand query «lionex» the average position is 3.9 across 32 impressions and 6 clicks. Above us stand other companies carrying the same word in their name — a crypto exchange and another agency. Sharing a brand name with unrelated domains is a common problem, and a link profile does not solve it.
Honest limits
Three things a backlink audit does not do.
It does not clean the profile. It is diagnostics: you see what you have and decide what comes next. The table changes nothing on its own, and most of its rows need no changing at all.
It almost never leads to a disavow. The disavow tool belongs to a narrow case: manual action for unnatural links in Search Console, with specific addresses you know. The advice to «disavow anything suspicious just in case» is harmful — that is how working links get thrown out, and getting them back is harder than it sounds.
And it does not lift rankings by itself. Links are one factor among many, and on a young site not the first one. A piece someone linked to unprompted counts for more than ten directories, and time in the index counts for more than both.
We will take the next measurement in a quarter. The numbers in this article stay where they are, as a baseline to compare against.
