The Importance of a Backlink Report
Performing regular backlink analysis is one of the most important things you can do to ensure your SEO efforts are on track. A backlink report allows you to look at vital metrics like new and lost links, referring pages, Anchor text, and more.
It also shows a breakdown of backlinks by referring domain, ccTLD, and server country. This can help you discover opportunities to improve your site.
Keywords
While backlinks remain a major ranking factor, it’s not the quantity but the quality that matters. A single strong link from an authoritative site is worth more than ten spammy links. This is why you should take the time to analyze your competitors’ backlinks and understand how they built theirs.
The first thing to look at is their anchor text. This is a good indication of whether your competitor has optimized their content for keywords or not. In addition, a backlink report can also show you if their links are dofollow or nofollow. You can also see if their links come from domains with high or low authority and which countries they’re coming from.
Then you can identify their top pages, which are the most linked-to pages on their site. This will give you a better idea of what type of content they create, such as statistics pages, tools, or thought leadership articles. It can also reveal if their pages cover transactional, commercial, or informational keywords.
Anchor text
The anchor text of a link is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization. It tells the search engine what the page is about and gives context for users. However, it can also have a negative impact on SEO if used incorrectly. Natural anchor text should be descriptive and include keywords that are relevant to the linked-to page. It should also be short and concise, not over-stuffing keywords.
The Backlinks Anchors report in Ahrefs Site Explorer allows you to analyze a domain’s most common anchor texts to understand what topics are associated with it. This data can be valuable for your own marketing strategies. For example, if a competitor uses a lot of exact match anchors, you can use that information to develop a similar strategy. However, you should remember that over-optimizing your anchor text can lead to penalties from Google. While a penalty is unlikely, it could have a significant impact on traffic and revenue.
Referring pages
A referring page is a unique page on another website that links to your page. This metric is useful because it shows how many backlinks your competitors have from specific pages on their websites. You can also use this metric to track how many new and lost links your competitors have over time.
You can use the referring pages report to search for backlinks by domain, subdomain, or exact URL. The results include a list of backlinks with information such as the number of referring pages, the referring page’s Page Authority score, the canonical linking URL, and the anchor text. You can also filter the report by link attribute, including Dofollow, Nofollow, or UGC.
You can also use this metric to identify spam backlinks, which are links that don’t pass link equity because they aren’t relevant to your content. You can then contact these sites and ask them to remove the spammy links. This is an effective way to improve your ranking, but it can be a long process.
Domains
A backlink analysis is a necessary step in the link building process. This tool allows you to compare your link profile with the competition and sculpt it to achieve similar results. In addition to total links, it also reveals the number of unique domains linking to your site. This metric is more important because Google places more value on backlinks from a variety of reputable sites than it does on links from the same site.
This information can help you identify potential opportunities for your own link-building campaign. For example, you can use this report to find blogs, media outlets, informational portals, and geographic areas that are already linking to your competitors’ sites. This information can help you target these domains for future partnerships. You can also use this data to disavow low-quality links through Google’s Disavow Tool. This will prevent Google from associating your site with them even if the web admin refuses to remove them.