Backlink tools: finding the pages that receive links before a migration

Before a migration, the redirect plan must cover every page of the old site that receives links from other sites. A crawl is not enough to find them: a page removed from the menus, deleted in an earlier redesign or never linked internally can receive links without any crawl seeing it. Backlink tools are what reveal them.

This article compares these tools and explains how to export their target pages. To understand what links bring and what a migration puts at risk, read why backlinks matter during a migration; to decide which pages to redirect, should you redirect every URL that receives links.

A backlink tool lists thousands of links: the linking page, its anchor, the page of your site it points to. For a migration only the last column matters: you do not redirect a link, you redirect the URL it points to. So look in each tool for the target pages report (most linked pages, best pages by links), which gives one row per URL of your site, with its number of links or referring domains.

• Google Search Console: free, it shows the links Google has found, and therefore the ones it takes into account; it only gives a sample and does not keep the history of pages that disappeared long ago.
• Majestic: a specialised link index, with a fresh index and a historic index; its Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics qualify pages.
• Ahrefs: a large and frequently updated link index; its DR (domain) and UR (page) metrics help spot the strongest pages.
• Semrush: best known for keywords, it also offers backlink analysis and the list of linked pages.
• SEObserver: a French tool that relies in particular on Majestic data, handy if you want to limit the number of licences.
• Babbar: a French tool that also measures page popularity through links.

No index sees every link on the web: two tools always return different lists. For a migration, combine at least the Search Console and one paid tool.

In the Search Console, open the "Links" report: the top linked pages table in the external links section gives the target pages of your site. Display it in full, then export it. It is the most often forgotten source, although it is free and reflects what Google sees.

Majestic lists the pages of your site that receive links, with their metrics, and lets you export them. Its historic index is useful for finding old URLs that still receive links. The step-by-step export and its import into Swan are covered in our article using Majestic with Swan for a migration.

In Ahrefs, the best by links report gives the URLs of your site ranked by number of referring domains; export it as CSV. See also our article on Ahrefs and SEO migration.

SEObserver lets you export the target pages of your links from its own data and Majestic's. The tutorial below shows the export; see also our article SEObserver.

In Semrush's backlink analysis, the indexed pages report gives the target URLs and their number of links. The video tutorial shows the export; see also our article Semrush.

In Swan, paste each export into the project's manual import, one URL per line, choosing its origin (Search Console, Majestic, Ahrefs, Semrush, Babbar). URLs already present are not duplicated: they receive the tag of the new origin. Each URL is then crawled and matched with the closest page of the new site, and the tag lets you check, in the URL list, that every page receiving links has its redirect.