No. Link Signals reads your public sitemap and the public pages it lists, the way a search engine does. Nothing is installed on your site, no password or login is shared, and nothing on the site is edited, deleted or written to.
The only sign-in involved is your own account with Link Signals, which keeps your reports together. It is separate from your site.
What Link Signals does and does not do
| It does | It does not |
|---|---|
| Read the sitemap you give it, or the one it finds from a bare domain | Log in to your site, your hosting or your WordPress dashboard |
| Fetch each public page in the sitemap, one request per page | Install a plugin, script or tracking code |
| Check where each link to another site leads | Edit, remove or add a link on any page |
| Report what it found, with the reason and the page the link sits on | Clean the site for you |
What it reads from your own site
- The
robots.txtfile, only to look forSitemap:lines. See which sitemap address to use. - The pages the sitemap lists, as a visitor would see them.
- On the homepage and about 10% of pages, the same page requested as a search crawler would, to catch links shown only to crawlers.
- The domain’s registration date, the certificate and the way HTTPS is served, for the site you scanned. Checking your own domain and certificate explains each.
Fixing what it finds is up to you
A report points at a link and the page it is on. Removing or changing the link happens in your own editor, theme or plugin, in the usual way. Link Signals does not apply fixes, which is also why it needs no access. After you have made a change, a re-check reads the live page again and shows whether the link is gone.
If you would rather it stayed away
Requests identify themselves as LinkSignalsBot. You can block that name on your server, or ask for your domain to be excluded so that nothing is requested from it at all. Blocking the Link Signals crawler gives the exact rules and says what each method does and does not stop.
Where to read more
- Sitemap discovery: how a sitemap is found and how pages are fetched safely.
- Accuracy and limits: what a read-only scan can and cannot see.
- What happens to my data: what is kept once a scan is done.
- Will Link Signals slow down my server?: how many requests it makes.
Questions
Do I need to be the site owner to scan a site?
A scan only needs a sitemap address, because it reads public pages. In practice you should scan sites you look after or have permission to check. Owners who do not want to be requested can ask for their domain to be excluded.
Is anything stored on my site after a scan?
No. Link Signals keeps its own record of the pages and links it read, in your account. It leaves no file, cookie or entry on your site.
Will my analytics show the visits?
The requests look like ordinary page loads from a crawler that names itself LinkSignalsBot. Whether your analytics counts them depends on how it filters bots, so a few visits may show in server logs even if they are filtered from reports.
Paste a sitemap or a domain and read the report. Nothing needs installing.
