Who links to my domain? Free ways to find out, and what each one misses

The domain

We bought draftingmillwork.com in September 2026. The listing claimed hundreds of referring domains. We wanted to know which pages those links pointed at, so each old address could get a real page instead of an error.

Four sources, four answers

Source	What it records	What it found
Wayback Machine	Copies of pages on the domain itself, when someone or something asked it to save them	One copy ever: a registrar's parking page, July 2025
Common Crawl	A public crawl of the web, published every few weeks, searchable by domain	No captures in the eleven indexes we checked, 2015 to August 2026. The first, 16 September 2026, came after we put a site up.
Web search	Pages a search engine has indexed that mention the domain	Nothing
top1m.org	A live index of domains that records which domains link to which	21 domains linking in, first seen between 18 July and 15 September 2026

A paid tool agreed with the fourth source. Moz reported 193 referring domains, 113,247 backlinks, and domain authority up 2,200% in twelve months.

Why three sources missed them

• They look at the wrong side. The Wayback Machine and a Common Crawl domain search show pages on your domain. A link lives on someone else's page. If nothing on your domain was ever worth saving, both come back empty, however many links point at it.
• The links were new. Every one appeared in the two months before we looked. Archives lag. A crawl published last year cannot hold a link planted last month.
• The links were hidden. They sat inside invisible blocks on hacked sites, so no page mentioned the domain in visible text for a search engine to show. (See Is your website hiding gambling links?)

How to check a domain, in order

1. Look it up in a live link index. Search top1m.org for the domain and read its inbound links: the source domain, and when it was first and last seen.
2. Visit the linking sites. An index tells you who links, not where the link points or what it says. Open each source page, view the source, and search for your domain. The link's target tells you which of your pages it points at. Its anchor text tells you what the linking site thinks you are.
3. Check the domain's past on the Wayback Machine. This does not find links, but it shows what the domain used to be, and so what old links expect to find.
4. Use a paid tool for the full count. Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush each keep their own link index. Their "top pages" report lists the pages on your domain that links point at. That list is what you rebuild or redirect.

What we found, and what we did

All the links we could open pointed at the home page, with the anchor text "Marsbahis" and "Marsbahis giriş", a Turkish betting brand. No inner pages to rebuild. The home page answers every one, and we added a short note there for anyone who arrives looking for that site.