Module 1 Lesson 3 Backlinks

Hello and welcome! In this lesson, we will learn about the Backlinksreport.

Backlinks are one of the most important Googleranking factors, and this report is where you can get ideas for link building.

It helps you:-find out you and your competitors’ backlinks, -and analyze their value and impact on domains.

Let’s explore the Backlinks report.

After typing a domain name in the search bar, you will see statistical data for backlinks to this domain.

Or, you can analyze a specific subdomain orURL.

In the report you will find two importantmetrics, Domain score and Trust score, with their value change over time.

Domain score is based on the number of backlinksto the analyzed domain.

Trust score is similar to Google’s no longerused PageRank.

It reflects the number of backlinks from trustedwebsites.

Always pay attention to these metrics.

The higher these scores, the more weight abacklink from the queried domain would have.

If the trust score is much lower than thedomain score, this means that the domain may have many potentially bad backlinks.

With the help of the ‘New and Lost backlinks’chart, you can find out: Your competitor’s link building behavior;how many new links your competitor has acquired recently, so you can plan your own link buildingefforts accordingly; which valuable backlinks were lost by yourcompetitor, so you could try to get them for your own website.

Then, you can see the backlinks’ distributionby type, follow/nofollow attributes, TLD zones and countries as well as most popular anchortexts.

Decide whether you should create more visualcontent and get more image backlinks to your website by analyzing your competitors in the“Backlink Types” chart.

See the relation between follow and nofollowbacklinks to your domain so you can focus on increasing “dofollow” backlinks.

Figure out backlinks of what TLD types yourcompetitors strive to acquire, and which ones your website is lacking, in order to havea rich backlink profile.

Focusing on backlinks from .

edu or .

gov websitescould be beneficial.

See what area of the world your competitorsare getting links with the help of the “Country” table and the “Geo Distribution” report.

You can also see if some of them are purchasingcheap backlinks – look out for arrays of links from sites located in irrelevant countries.

Get even more insights into your competitors’link building strategy from the “Top Anchors” and “Top Anchor Terms” lists.

It is essential that their top anchors andanchor terms correlate with products or services they push the most.

In other words, you can find out what yourcompetitors are promoting and how.

Finally, with the help of the “Overview”report you can compare several domains’ backlink profiles and their main metrics.

Under the ‘Backlinks’ tab is the detailedlist of backlinks furnished with data, such as:- Page and Trust score, – target URL, – anchor text, – number of internal and external outcominglinks, – first and last seen dates.

You can filter the list by anchor name, linktype, follow/nofollow attribute and other parameters.

Here is a couple of examples of what usefulinformation you can find: it is possible to see your competitors’freshest valuable links by combining the “new” and “follow” filters;Or, which links your competitors have lost in a specific zone or from a referring domain.

If you’re analyzing your domain, you cansend backlinks you regard as low-quality to the Disavow list.

Then, you can upload them to Backlink Auditor to export them to a .

txt file.

The more domains refer to the analyzed domain, the more trustworthy it is regarded by Google.

So, the ‘Referring Domains’ tab will behandy as it will provide you with the detailed list of domains linking to the analyzed domain.

You may want to filter this list by TLD typeand country by using the proper tabs or applying advanced filters.

This can help you find the sources of backlinksyou might be interested in the most.

Not only is the number of referring domainsan important ranking factor, but the number of referring IPs as well.

The ‘Referring IPs’ tab will provide youwith this information.

If a certain IP address hosts a suspiciouslyhigh number of referring domains, this could be an indication of black-hat SEO.

The ‘Indexed Pages’ tab shows you thepages of the domain discovered by SEMrush.

The pages are sorted by the number of backlinksfrom other websites.

You can check out your competitors’ toppages to understand what content persuaded referring websites’ owners to link to them.

Keep an eye on the “Internal Links” metricas well.

This might help you get ideas on how to properlylink internally to help your rankings.

The “Competitors” report will show yourcompetitors in terms of common backlinks.

After using this report, you may start analyzingyour competition to discover more link building ideas.

With the “Comparison” report, it is possibleto compare several domains’ backlink acquisition over time.

This will show you what your place is withinyour competitive niche and whom to take as an example in your link building efforts.

You can find a similar report, “BacklinksGap”, under the “Gap Analysis” section.

Finally, you can compare up to 200 domains, URLs or their mixture by several parameters in the ‘Quick Batch’ tab.

It is worth using when you want to analysemany competitors at a time, or need to define which domains to work with.

So, to sum up: to get ideas for link building, review your backlinks and your competitors’ backlinks and estimate their value, by usingthe Backlinks report.

Practice makes perfect, so don’t forgetto play around with this report.

It is crucial to study the Read Further sectionsince it contains more information needed to pass the exam.

Go to the SEMrush blog or our knowledge basefor more information.

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