Google Search Console provides valuable information about links that point from other websites to your website, also often referred to as backlinks. Links have always been (and still are) an important ranking factor for search engines and thus play an important role in SEO.
searchVIU uses backlink data to check whether a link that is pointing to your current website will still point to a working target after your website migration. As backlinks pass relevance to the linked page and also to other pages on your website, you don’t want them to point to error pages or unimportant pages after you redesign or migrate your website.
Backlink data can be found in various sources. None of the sources provides a complete data set of all of the backlinks to your website that exist. Therefore, it is necessary to combine data from different sources, in order to obtain high data quality.
If you link Google Analytics to searchVIU, some important backlink data can already be imported automatically. searchVIU checks the Google Analytics referral traffic report for links that actually generate traffic to your page and then crawls the linking URLs to verify that the link is really there.
There are other tools that provide interesting backlink data, but you need a paid subscription for most of them. One tool that provides this kind of data for free is Google Search Console.
In order to export link data from Google Search Console, you simply go to the Links report in the left sidebar navigation:
