SEO Tools: Analyzing Your Link Profile on Ahrefs.com

Ahrefs is an essential tool in an SEO's arsenal and a useful platform for site owners to better control and understand how their projects are progressing. Using Ahrefs, you can analyze keywords, content, positions of both your site and competitors’ sites. However, one of the most popular functions is the analysis of external links. The service's link database is updated every 15 minutes and includes trillions of records.

Why it is important to monitor your link profile and how to analyze it will be discussed in this article.

*All screenshots can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Why track external links?

The period of mass purchasing of links according to the principle “the more the better” has passed. Modern search engines pay significant attention to the quality of a site’s link profile. Projects with bad links not only do not make it to the top, but may also be subject to sanctions by search engines.

Thus, controlling links to a website is an important task for any SEO specialist. Tracking external links is necessary in the following cases:

• If you want to find out how many sites link to your resource, what sites they are, and what is in the text of these links. Anchor text plays an important role here as it influences how search engines perceive your site.
• If you plan to post affiliate material with a link to your website on a third-party resource. By entering a domain into Ahrefs, you can evaluate the site's ranking and understand whether the link will be useful for your project.
• If you want to analyze the link profile of your competitors. Information about the quantity and quality of external links from competitors, especially those from the top 10, will help in developing a promotion strategy.

How does this work?

Let's look at the example of a commercial website that provides special equipment for rent.

*Please note that I have no affiliation with this site and the domain is hidden in the images to maintain privacy.

General overview

To get started, enter the site's URL into Ahrefs and get an overview of it in the "Overview" section.

On this screen we are interested in several key indicators:

• Ahrefs Rank — page ranking by link profile. The lower the value, the better. However, there are no ideal values, and to evaluate it, it is worth comparing this indicator with other sites in your niche.
• UR (URL Rating) — the rating of the page to which the link leads. Evaluated based on the quality of the internal and external link profile. The range is from 1 to 100, where the higher the value, the better.
• DR (Domain Rating) — rating of the entire domain. Score a domain based on its link quality in the Ahrefs database. The higher the DR, the stronger the domain.
• Backlinks and Donor Domains — the number of links to a specific page and the number of unique domains from which these links originate. The smaller the difference between these indicators, the more organic the link profile looks.

Link profile

The following is an analysis of the dynamics of changes in the Ahrefs Rank of the site. For example, you can see how it increased sharply during a certain period.

This growth may indicate the purchase of links, especially if there is a sharp jump and then a drop. It is better if the growth is smoother and more stable, which looks natural for search engines.

Using such data, you can analyze the dynamics of donor domains and donor pages, which will help in the future when developing a promotion strategy.

Anchors

Special attention should be paid to the “Anchors” section, where you can see what text is used in links to your site. This can be done manually or by using filters to sort links by type (for example, Dofollow or Nofollow), word count, and so on.

An organic link profile includes a variety of anchors: commercial queries, common phrases, site domain. The main thing is not to abuse commercial requests so that your profile does not look artificial.

Additional information

In the Link Profile section you will also find several useful metrics:

• Procrawler pages — the number of site pages that are indexed by Ahrefs. Ideally, their number should correspond to the pages available for indexing.
• IP donors — the number of unique IP addresses from which links come. Although multiple sites can reside on the same server, this does not have a significant impact on the link profile.
• Donor subnets - as in the case of IP donors, this is an indicator that evaluates donors by larger units - subnets.
• Backlinks — analysis of donor links by their type (for example, dofollow/nofollow) and percentage.
• Rating distribution of links — shows how donor domains are distributed according to UR rating. If the majority of domains have low scores (0 to 10), this may indicate poor link quality.

What to do about it?

Tracking bad links helps you get rid of them and minimize their negative impact on your site.

To do this, you can go to the “Backlinks” section, sort the links by domain rating, anchor and other characteristics. To make the process easier, you can export the data to an Excel spreadsheet and analyze it there. Links with low rankings (0 to 10) should be disavowed by informing search engines.

In Google, this can be done through the Search Console by disavowing low-quality links. For Yandex, you need to contact technical support with a file containing cancellation links.

If the links are natural, such as linking to your site because it is interesting or useful, they should be left. Analyze such links, filtering out junk and purchased ones.

If you're analyzing a competitor's link profile, sort out the quality links, study what pages they link to, what anchors are used, and what types of links are most effective. This information will help you build a promotion strategy for your website.

For any questions, you can contact the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER" by email info@seo.computer.

ID 4925