Within the Ahrefs system, we have the ability to deeply analyze incoming and outgoing links on our website using the Ahrefs link index. The link analysis option is used for several important checks that must be performed regularly when promoting a website – competitor link analysis, checking for spam links and submitting a Disavow file, checking if a link is Follow or NoFollow, and more. In this chapter of getting to know the Ahrefs platform, we will go over backlink analysis in the tool.
Backlink Profile
To view the backlink profile of a specific website or page, enter the link you want to crawl in the URL field at the top. In the analysis options, you can select Domain or Subdomain in order to crawl an entire website (when you place the domain in the crawl field). Afterward, on the main screen following the crawl, you will receive a dashboard with information about backlinks, organic traffic, and additional metrics for this website.
To dive deep and review the full backlink profile of a specific website, click on the word Backlinks in the Ahrefs sidebar. Within the detailed list of external links your website receives, you will be able to see an expanded list of all the links you receive from the outside. The list can be filtered using relevant filters such as One Link Per Domain which essentially aggregates domains that point to you more than once in the display, filtering by DoFollow or NoFollow to help you display the links that pass ranking power to your website (DoFollow). To check links in the best possible way, I recommend filtering by Group Similar.
The reason for using Group Similar is that when filtering a large amount of external links in Ahrefs, most of the time you don’t need to see all the links pointing to the site at any given moment. Getting a general understanding of which domain links originate from will help you understand who the linking site is and why it links to you, and when you click Group Similar or One Link Per Domain, you get this information at the click of a button.
What can you do with the information found in the backlink profile?
After you have received the full backlink report consisting of your external link profile, there are 2 main things you can do with this information:
1. You can find websites that link to your competitors and ask them for a link as well
After you have checked a URL of one of your competitors, you can check in the backlink report which websites link to them, whether the link they receive is Follow, and also what the anchor text (the exact phrase) is from which the link points to your competitor’s website. This action can help you reach out to the websites that decided to link to your competitors, and you can ask them to link to you as well in exchange for content or a monetary fee. If you manage to get links from the same domains as your competitors, the gap between their backlink profile and yours will shrink.
2. You can understand why your competitors receive links from other websites
For the purpose of demonstration, we will analyze the links on Daniel Zrihen’s website and check why and how external sites choose to link to his website. You can see in the image before you that a large portion of the links to the website come from Footer links of other websites – which is typical to receive from sites you built or for which you provide a specific SEO or marketing service (of course, the business owner must want to give you a link and it is not mandatory). It is important to emphasize that for a website like Daniel Zrihen’s, a multidisciplinary website that receives links from about 900 different domains, there will be a very diverse backlink profile and many types of links will surface in the analysis of such a site; therefore, it is recommended to start with competitors that are closer to your scale so you can truly compete with them.
Link Intersect
The Link Intersect option in the Ahrefs system helps us deeply analyze the external backlink profile of several websites simultaneously. In the top menu of Ahrefs, click on Link Intersect, enter the 2 or more websites you want to check, and click Show Link Opportunities. Now you can see a list of links that 2 sites receive, allowing you to know which websites refer to your competitor’s site, which will help you understand one of the reasons the competing site outranks your site in Google rankings.
Why is using Link Intersect useful?
When you run a check in the Link Intersect tool with your website and several competitor websites, if a certain site links to one of your competitors, it won’t necessarily tell you much because perhaps the website owners know each other or there happened to be relevant content on the site worth linking to. However, if there is a website that links to several of your competitors and not to you, it shows that this website has a tendency to link to websites of your type, which means they might be willing to link to you as well. Link Intersect is the most recommended tool for analyzing your backlinks relative to competitors.
Best by Links
You can find the Best By Links option on the left side of the menu under the Pages tab. The Best By Links option essentially displays the pages that receive the most referrals via external links on your website or your competitors’ websites. After checking the backlink profile on the DoLead website, it can be seen that the main domain receives external links from 71 domains and that in total, 16 pages within its website receive external links.
Using Best By Links also helps you understand how your competitors’ websites are structured, which pages they aim to promote, and on which keywords they receive a link for the website or a page on the website. This information can be relevant and also improve the SEO on your website. For example – if, after a check you performed in the Best By Links option of Ahrefs, you found a competitor receiving many links to a high-quality guide on their website, you can draw ideas for topics to write about that will also be relevant to your website.
New Backlinks
The option to filter links by new links (New) shows you a list of websites that recently linked to your website. Using this filter will help you understand how you acquired the new links to your website and what is currently working in terms of your link building strategy. In other words, if you took steps to improve the content on your site and identified that referring domains were added, continue making those improvements to your website to gain additional backlinks. Bottom line, tracking the new external links your website receives can help you identify new link building opportunities that you can capitalize on immediately, and also see what has been working best for you recently in terms of your link building strategy.
Lost Backlinks
The option to filter links by lost or removed external links (Lost) generates a list of links that you previously received from websites and where the link from them was removed. Using this analysis feature gives you the opportunity to reclaim links that were removed or lost. If you can find out why the website owner who linked to you decided to remove it, you can sometimes get it back. It is normal to lose links because sometimes certain websites delete pages from the site or someone updates posts on their site and removes irrelevant external links. Additionally, if you purchase links from vendors, this is an excellent tool for you to ensure over time that no link you purchased is removed later.
Note: Sometimes Ahrefs will show a link under Lost even though the link is still on the site. Therefore, it is recommended to visit the URL where the supposedly lost link is located and verify that this is indeed the case.
Conclusion
We covered the impact of Ahrefs on helping marketers focus on executing quality organic SEO on a website, and we also covered one of the main advantages of the Ahrefs platform – backlink analysis capabilities. Using the options you saw in this guide will help you monitor the links your website receives and also analyze your competitors to the point where you can know exactly which websites they receive links from. Using Link Intersect is a central part of the competitor analysis process, where you can analyze links of several competitors simultaneously.
About the Author
Dvir Naaman, 27 years old, graduate of the Digital Marketing course at HackerU College. Experienced in building WordPress websites, PPC advertising on Google, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok platforms. Specializes in organic search engine optimization (SEO) at Fialkov Digital. Has rich experience in eCommerce and dropshipping, and is the owner of Merchant Center – a website aggregating information on eCommerce systems and advanced marketing systems to increase business conversions, with an emphasis on eCommerce store sales.
