SEO

How to use the Ahrefs backlinks report

Ahrefs Backlinks report: In this report, we show the backlinks pointing to any domain, URL, subdomain (e.g., blog.domain.com), or subfolder (e.g., domain.com/blog/). Use the drop-down to select your preferred mode.

Here I will show you some actionable ways to use this report.

See all your competitor’s backlinks on Ahrefs Backlinks report

Enter a competitor’s website analysis to see all their backlinks.

For example, if you were doing SEO for MailChimp, then you could look at the backlinks to activecampaign.com or convertkit.com.

–: TIP :–
Are you reviewing a large website? Looking at backlinks to the domain can be overwhelming and pulling actionable insights can be difficult. For that reason, it’s often worth narrowing things down to a particular URL or subfolder instead.

From here, you can look for potentially replicable links.

Here are a couple of filtering and sorting options which will help with this:

• Set the “dofollow” filter to point out only the value-passing links
• Set the language filter to exclude foreign-language links
• Sort by the Traffic column to prioritize links with the facility to send referral traffic
• Set the Traffic filter to a worth greater than zero to exclude low-quality pages with little or no traffic
• Filter for Content links to ascertain contextual, in-content links

For example, ActiveCampaign’s pricing page has ~230 backlinks.

But if we filter for only the “dofollow” ones, with traffic, from pages written in English, we’re left with just 16 links to review.

NOTE. You can also sort the report by many of the other metric columns in ascending or descending order. The screenshot above shows the results sorted by estimated traffic from high to low.

In short, the filters allow you to narrow down potential link prospects to a more manageable number and focus on the kinds of links you want to build.

Ahrefs Backlinks report: Search competitors’ link profiles for specific link opportunities

Use the search to include or exclude backlinks with certain words or phrases in the:

• URLs of referring pages
• Titles of referring pages
• URLs of backlinks
• Anchors
• Surrounding texts

This is useful for mining-specific link opportunities from your competitors’ link profiles.

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For example, search for words like “resources” or “links” in the URLs and titles of referring pages to find resource pages from which your competitor has links.

TIP: Depending on how precise you want to be with your search, you can specify that your chosen word or phrase be in all or any of the selected locations.

To loosen your requirements, select any. To help weed out potentially irrelevant results, select all.

If your competitor is getting links from such pages, chances are it would make sense for your website to be listed as a resource too. Learn more in this video:

You could also search for words and phrases like “guest post” or “written by” in the anchors or surrounding link text to find guest post opportunities.

Or, alternatively, look for /author/ in the URL of referring pages for a competitor’s homepage.

If your competitor is a guest author for a particular website, then you know they’re open to accepting guest posts. More importantly, you know they’re open to receiving guest posts from businesses like yours.

Some other potential use cases for the search function: Ahrefs Backlinks report

• Find roundups by searching for words like “expert,” “roundup,” “weekly,” “monthly,” etc. in the titles of referring pages.
• Find interview and podcast opportunities by searching for words like “podcast,” “episode,” “interview,” etc. in the URLs and/or titles of referring pages.
• Find backlinks that occurred because an infographic was embedded by searching for “infographic” in any of the targets.

Track down potentially harmful backlinks through Ahrefs Backlinks report

Google classes “widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites” as a link scheme* that can “negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

These are the kinds of links that you should track down and disavow.

To help find them, make sure the Backlinks report is set to “Group similar” mode, add a “dofollow” filter, and then sort by the Similar column from high to low.

This will show backlinks with the same or similar anchor and surrounding text—which are often sitewide links.

Hit the caret on any suspicious-looking websites (i.e., the sites from which you wouldn’t expect to have this quantity of backlinks).

You should be especially worried if these links use keyword-rich anchors, like so:

Google states that such links are manipulative and are a violation of their guidelines.

IMPORTANT – Ahrefs Backlinks report
Sitewide links aren’t the only potentially harmful links. Learn more about identifying bad links here, and deflecting negative SEO attacks here.

If the site you’re reviewing is already in your Ahrefs Backlinks report – Dashboard, then you can easily add offending web pages or domains to your disavow file. Now select it and click “Disavow Domains” or “Disavow URLs.”

This disavow file is accessible via the Dashboard.

IMPORTANT –  Ahrefs Backlinks report. We only create the disavow file. You will still need to submit it to Google manually. We also don’t recommend disavowing links—and certainly not entire domains—unless you’re confident that said links are harmful. If you’re in any doubt as to the quality of links from a particular website, always consult with an expert before disavowing.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review 2021

What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool is an intelligent site-auditor bot that crawls all over your entire site and looks for critical problems. In this Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool review, I’ll go over the tool. I’ll also list its pros and cons so you can decide if it’s right for your business.
The latest version of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider latest Version is 13.2 . Screaming Frog is used by organization SEO Specialists around the world. With Screaming Frog Tools online, we get crawling and indexing issues to be solved great free tools for small SEO budgets. Its a time-saver and makes technical SEO life so easier for SEO Specialists!

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Features:

• The possibility of analyzing and checking the status of SEOs of various types of Internet sites.
• Suitable for business website owners, Download websites, entertainment websites, and more.
• Ability to check and display internal and external links.
• Possibility to display meta description, keywords, title, address, and more.
• Ability to display data in graphical graphs.
• SEO Ranking and Website Optimization in a simple interface.
  And many more.

To answer those questions, you could manually audit your website by visiting each and every page. You will be grateful if you could let a tool like Screaming Frog SEO handle that tedious process for you. Once it crawls your site, it generates reports so you can find what’s wrong and take corrective action.

• How many problems are on your entire website right now?
• How many broken images?
• Which of your pages are missing meta descriptions?
• Do any of your URLs have a missing H1 tag?

Screaming Frog SEO spider tool review

Why do you need this tool?

There are LOTS of links inside a website and not all links are good. Sometimes there are broken links and you need to fix them or else it’s a turn-off to search engine spiders. This tool helps you look out for the obviously broken links that you have.

Sometimes you just need to check how a search engine spider crawls through your site. This tool helps you see which pages get indexed, which doesn’t. You can even activate the following internal/external nofollow option if you want to see how Yahoo and Bing’s spider crawls your site (since Bing and Yahoo ignores nofollow tags)

You can also check out if your pages are missing canonicals or which of your images are missing Alt Texts. It’s a very handy, very useful, and FREE tool!

You can use Screaming Frog on daily basis. With the premium tool, you can only track a few hundred (or thousand, the exact amount) URLs at a time. You can use the tool for thousands of things to improve your SEO, like checking 404s, 302/301, metatags, missing heading tags, amount of internal links to pages, insert a list of AdWords destination URLs to check their status code, but also more technical functions like custom extraction :

What you can do with the SEO Spider Tool?

OMG, really it’s an amazing tool for SEO lovers. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a very powerful and flexible site crawler tool, able to crawl both small and very large websites easily and efficiently while allowing you to analyses the real-time results. It flocks key on-site data to allow SEOs to make informed decisions.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Find Broken Links

Crawl your entire website instantly and find out broken links (404s) and server errors. Export the Bulk errors and source URLs to fix, or send the report to a developer.

Annalise Page Titles & Meta Data

You can research of page titles and meta descriptions during a crawl and recognize those that are too long, short, missing, or duplicated across your whole site.

Extract Data with XPath

Collect any data from the HTML of a website using CSS Path, XPath, or regex. This ability includes social meta tags, additional headings, prices, SKUs, or more tags!

Screaming frog SEO spider sitemap Generate XML

You can easily create XML Sitemaps and Image XML Sitemaps, with advanced configuration over URLs to include, last modified, priority and change frequency or more!

Crawl JavaScript Websites

Render website using the integrated Chromium WRS to crawl dynamic, JavaScript rich web pages and frameworks, such as Angular, React, and Vue.js. languages.

Audit Redirects

Find temporary and permanent redirects links to identify redirect chains and loops, or upload a list of links to survey in website migration.

Discover Duplicate Content

Detect exact and near-duplicate content, duplicate resources such as page titles, descriptions, or headings tags, and find low content posts and pages.

Review Robots & Directives

View links blocked by robots.txt, meta tags robots, or X-Robots-Tag directives links such as ‘noindex’ or ‘nofollow’, as well as canonicals links and rel=“next” and rel=“prev”.

Integrate with GA, GSC & PSI

Connect to the Google Analytics site Search Console and PageSpeed Insights APIs to fetch user and website performance data for all URLs in a crawl for greater insight.

Visualized Site Architecture

Evaluate internal linking and external URL feature using interactive crawl and directory force-directed graph and tree diagram site visualizations.

Screaming Frog SEO spider tool review:

It’s Not a Cloud-Based Solution, it’s a downloadable pc software

First of all, you should know that Screaming Frog is that it’s not a cloud-based solution Applications. It’s software that you have to download and install on your PC.

As of now, the tool runs on Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu. If you’re attached to any other operating system, you’re out of luck. Also, if you’re accustomed to using tools that run in the cloud (like SEMRush, Ahrefs, for example), you might be disappointed that you have to install something just to check for errors on your website.

There’s a reason for it, though. The company that created Screaming Frog SEO Spider tools (which, oddly enough, is also named Screaming Frog Tools) doesn’t want to host a website that runs bots all over cyberspace. Fortunately, it’s an ado to install the software locally.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is free or paid

You can get started with Screaming Frog for free, Like other SEO marketing tools, But you’ll have only limited use. Currently, if you’re using the free version, Screaming Frog will capture the number of pages you can crawl at 500. You also won’t be able to connect with popular tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Link Metrics, etc.

Buy now Screaming Frog SEO Spider keys 2021

Screaming Frog is a UK based SEO agency company so you’ll have to pay in pounds. If you decide to buy, the price is £149.00 annually its about $200 per year. The truth is that you can’t get that much feature use out of the free version. So you should pay the annual fee. Most of the features discussed here are only available with the pro version of the software.

Screaming frog SEO spider license key 2021

• Offer 1: £149 per year 1 – 4 licenses
• Offer 2: £139 per year 5 – 9 licenses
• Offer 3: £129 per year 10 – 19 licenses
• Offer 4: £119 per year 20+ licenses

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: At first, It Starts With Crawling

Screaming Frog is first and leading a crawler. Once you’ve installed it, you’ll use it to visit webpages on your website. Just enter the links of your website and the tool will start there and crawl every page. If you’ve configured your website rightly, it should scan all the pages.

How does it crawl?

The same way that Google crawls your website: it follows URLs. It will find URLs on your site menu, header, footer, and content. Then, it will follow those links. If you’ve got a website with thousands of pages, you might need to increase the amount of memory that the spider uses. Luckily, Screaming Frog lets you do that very easily.

Alternatively, you’ll switch to database mode. That way, the tool will store your crawl data on disk rather than in memory. You don’t need to crawl your entire site with Screaming Frog, though. You can select a subdomain or folder for a crawler. For example, if you want the tool to crawl only pages under blog. mydomain.com or mydomain.com/blog, you can configure it to do that. It’s flexible. You can also give Screaming Frog an inventory of URLs to crawl. That’s useful for site migrations. Keep in mind, Screaming Frog will honor your robots.txt file. If there are particular pages that are disallowed, don’t expect the tool to crawl them.

Finally, You can save your crawled website data to your pc so you can refer back to them later. In fact, Screaming Frog allows you to save lots of files mid-crawl then resume the crawl afterward once you open the file again.

What Does the SEO Spider Tool Crawl and Reports On

You might be asking yourself: what’s the point of a bot crawling an entire your website?
In a Briefly, actually it’s designed to find problems. For example, you might have broken URLs on your website. If so, Screaming Frog will find them. You’ll have a page where the title tag doesn’t match the H1 tag. Screaming Frog will detect that as a problem as well. There are numerous other issues that the tool will identify for you. Especially Screaming Frog is designed to help with on-site SEO. It’s especially great at uncovering technical problems.

Screaming Frog SEO spider Tool Review: Introducing Tabs

Once Screaming Frog is completed crawling your site, you’ll have access to more information than you’ll possibly need. Fortunately, it’s all categorized and put into separate tabs. within the next several sections, I’ll re-evaluate each tab.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Internal Tab

The Internal tab gives you all the details on your entire website. As is the case with the rest of the tabs, the data is presented in a table. Each line in the table represents a separate URL. For each URL, you’ll see important info such as the status code returned, page title, meta description, H1 contents, H2 contents, and word count. It’s the best starting point if you’re new to the tool. That’s why it’s also the default tab.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: External Tab

The External tab will show you info about external website URLs. While you won’t see the maximum details about external pages as you do about internal pages, you’ll still get plenty of useful info, such as the content type, status code returned, and the number of links that point to the URL.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Internal Tab

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Protocol Tab

The Protocol tab shows you which pages use the secure (HTTPS) protocol and which use the non-secure (HTTP) protocol. Each line will also show you the status code and content type of the URL crawled.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Response Codes Tab

Use the Response Codes tab to speedily see which links on your website are returning anything other than a good (200) response. The typical “bad” response is the 404 code (not found). However, the report will also show you redirect (3XX) and server error (5XX) response codes.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: URI Tab

The URI tab includes data related to the requested URLs. If you’re really interested in learning about the difference between URLs and URIs, you can check out Daniel Miessler’s explanation. It’s not a subject that you’ll find exciting, though. The tab includes info about each URI, such as its content, status code returned, and hash value.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider URI tab

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Page Titles Tab

You probably know about the importance of page titles in SEO. That’s why the Page Titles tab is so valuable. It includes info about site titles found on each link, such as the number of titles per page and the character length of each title. The tab will also show you webpages that have missing titles, duplicate titles, and titles that are either too short (less than 35 characters) or too long (more than 65 characters).

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Meta Description Tab

The Meta Description tab is yet other tab that lives up to its name. For each link crawled, you can see how many meta descriptions found on the page, their contents, and their lengths. The tab will also show you webpages that are missing meta descriptions, Webpages with duplicate meta descriptions, and pages with meta descriptions that are more than 320 characters in length.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Meta Keyword Tab

Google omits the meta keywords tag these days, you might still find this tab necessary. It will show you the number of occurrences and articles of meta keywords tags on each webpage.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: H1 Tab

The H1 tag is another necessary part of on-site SEO. That’s why you ought to check this tab out once Screaming Frog is completed crawling your site. Use it to seek out pages that have a missing H1 tag, a replica H1 tag, or an H1 tag with contents that are longer than 70 characters.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: H2 Tab

If you’re writing long-form content, it’s usually best to interrupt it up into manageable chunks so that people can more easily read it. Each chunk should have its own subheading, generally created with an H2 tag. This tab will show you which of the pages are missing H2 tags, which have duplicate H2 tags, and which have H2 tags with contents longer than 70 characters.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Images Tab

Screaming Frog doesn’t just crawl your text content. It crawls image links as well. The Images tab will show you which one images are larger than 100kb, which are missing alt text, and which have alt text that’s longer than 100 characters.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Directives Tab

The Directives tab will show you the number of meta robots and canonicals. Use it to see which webpages have canonicals, which are using rel=”next” or rel=”prev,” and which are using directives like “nofollow” or “noindex.”

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: hreflang Tab

If you’re into global SEO, you’ll find the hreflang tab valuable. As the name implies, it will show you details about the hreflang attribute on each page. Use the hreflang tab to find missing confirmation links, inconsistent language confirmation links, non-canonical confirmation links, noindex confirmation links, and incorrect language codes.

Screaming Frog SEO hreflang Tab

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: AJAX Tab

AJAX (Asynchronous Java-script and XML) is the most popular technology that makes an upscale user experience. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions use it all the time. To look at valid data in the AJAX tab, you’ll have to configure Screaming Frog to crawl your site with Javascript rendering. If you’re interested in learning more about your AJAX URLs and the status codes they return, click on this tab.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Custom Tab

The Custom tab will show you data retrieved with a Screaming Frog manual search. you’ll use custom search to go with your HTML source and extract data with XPath, regex, or CSS Path. Then, you’ll create a search-specific filter within the Custom tab to view the data you’re trying to find.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Analytics Tab

The Analytics tab will show you metrics collected from Google Analytics. That’s assuming you integrated the tool with GA. If you’re already familiar with Google Analytics, then the Analytics tab will show you familiar info, like the number of sessions, percentage of latest sessions, number of latest users, and average session duration. you’ll use this tab to seek out pages that have a high bounce rate.

Screaming Frog SEO Tool Review: Analytics Tab

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Search Console Tab

Just as the Analytics tab shows you data collect from Google Analytics, the Search Console tab shows you data collected from Google Search Console. Once again, you’ll need to connect the tool with the Search Console to see valid data in the tab. Use this tab to see the number of times each page appears in the search results as well as the number of clicks each page gets from the SERPs.</p>

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Reports

Screaming Frog provides several different reports. Each of them can be accessed under the Reports menu. In the next several sections, I’ll go over the various reports.

Screaming Frog SEO Tool Review: Crawl Overview Report

The Crawl Overview Report is the summary of the crawl. It includes important data such as

• Number of URLs found
• Number of URLs blocked by robots.txt
• Number of URLs crawled
• Content types encountered
• Response codes encountered

Basically, the Crawl Overview Report is a bird’s-eye view of the info you’ll see in all the tabs.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Redirect Chains Report

Do you want to know which of your pages are redirecting to different URLs? If so, have a glance at the Redirect Chains Report. The format of the report depends on whether you crawled the site in Spider mode or List mode. In Spider mode, you’ll see redirect chains that include two or more Links. Use that info to optimize your site link redirects. In List mode, you’ll see every URL on a separate line.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Canonical Errors Report

If you’re using canonicals to affect duplicate content issues, you’ll find the Canonical Errors Report especially valuable. The report will show you any problems with canonicals. That includes no response, 3XX, 4XX, or 5XX response codes. Additionally, the report will show you canonicals discovered within webpages but not linked to on the site.

Screaming Frog SEO Tool Review: Hreflang Report

There are four Hreflang Reports

• Errors – Hreflang attributes that return anything aside from a 200 (good) response.
• Missing Confirmation Links – Pages that are missing a confirmation link or aren’t confirming.
• Inconsistent Language Confirmation URLs – Pages that use different language codes to the equivalent page.
• Non-Canonical Confirmation Links – Confirmation links that time to non-canonical URLs.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Insecure Content Report

If you’re using HTTPS (and you should be if you aren’t), you’ll want to know about non-secure elements on your pages. That’s why you should look at the Insecure Content Report. For example, you might have a page that people access with the HTTPS protocol. However, embedded within that page is a link to an image using the HTTP protocol. If Screaming Frog encounters that situation, it’ll flag the difficulty within the Insecure Content Report. It’s best to move your site entirely to HTTPS. That means links to pictures, JavaScript libraries, and CSS code should all use HTTPS.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Orphan Pages Report

The Orphan Pages Report shows you URLs found via the Google Analytics and Search Analytics APIs that weren’t found during the crawl. If you’re seeing URLs on this report, that means people are finding some of your content via the search engines but you don’t have any links to that content on your website. That often happens after a site migration.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Crawl Path Report

The Crawl Path Report shows you the shortest path Screaming Frog took to urge to a selected URL. That’s useful if you’re finding that some of your content is buried deep on your site. It’s usually a good idea to bring quality content as close to the top as possible.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Exporting

As you know many other SEO tools available on the market, you’ll export Screaming Frog data so you don’t need to view it in the tool. In fact, Screaming Frog allows you to pick which data you would like to export. So if you’re only curious about looking at image-specific data, for example, you’ll create an export file that only includes that information. There are numerous other export options also, including All Internal links, All Outlinks, All Anchor Text, and Response Codes.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: Pros and Cons

As you know the other tool, you’ll find that people have opinions about Screaming Frog. A number of those opinions are good and some are bad. Here’s what users are saying about the tool.

First, the Pros of Screaming Frog

1. Easy-to-understand user interface.
2. It will help you uncover any and all issues with your site.
3. Integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
4. Crawls websites quickly.
5. Scanning modes and optimizations that you will make collective reports help you a lot.
6. Easy to export data.
7. Empowers users to configure crawling options.
8. I think the design seems easy. Point at a domain and you get a list back. So easy to use and get what you need.
9. Inexpensive.

Second, the Cons of Screaming Frog

1. The Screaming Frog tool constantly updating and you have to wait for it to finish updating before you use it.
2. Doesn’t run in the cloud.
3. There is no disadvantage of this software, whenever I am working on any website I always prefer screaming frog.
4. The user interface looks a bit like an Excel spreadsheet.
5. Lacks an API.
6. The free account is very limited.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review: The Verdict

There’s a really good reason why many SEO professionals view Screaming Frog as an important tool: it helps them quickly find site problems. Although there are other similar tools on the market, Screaming Frog is one of the “pioneers” in its space. That’s how it gained such widespread popularity.

It’s also maintained by a group that handles SEO consulting as part of their core business. So you know they’ll make sure it keeps up with all the changes in the industry. My ultimate answer is yes for Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Review, you ought to add Screaming Frog to your toolset. It’s indispensable for on-site SEO.