SEO Book.com |
| AHREFS Review: An In-Depth Look at a New Link Research Tool Posted: 31 Jan 2012 05:28 PM PST Ahrefs is the newest entry into the link research tool space. They use their own bot and their own index (which they state is based on information from a trillion website connections). They claim their index is updated every 30 minutes and the fresh data is available to their users within 30 minutes of the actual index refresh. Ahrefs also has a ranking database of roughly 45 million keywords from 9 different countries (US GB FR RU DE ES IT AU BR). The tools within their membership are:
Their pricing is very straight-forward and only increases or decreases based on volume of data you have access to. You can check out the easy to understand pricing on their pricing page (and they offer SEO Book readers a 50% discount on the first month). Site ExplorerAhref's Site Explorer functions in a similar way to Majestic's Site Explorer and SeoMoz's Site Explorer. You can choose a specific URL, the domain without subdomains, or domain with all its subdomains: If we look at the Site Explorer results, you'll see an overview of the last 45 days or so from Ahref's crawl history: On the left you can see some interesting stats like the total number of backlinks, different referring IP's and subnets (class c blocks and such), unique domains, and the types of backlinks the site has (text, image, redirects, and so on). In addition to the overview report, you have other research options to chose from:
New LinksIn the New Link tab you can go back to a previous month, or work inside the current month, and find newly discovered links by the day. Here is what that looks like: Click on whatever day you want and you'll get a list of linking urls, the target link page, and the anchor text used for the link: This report can help you reverse engineer, down to the day, a link building campaign that your competitor is running (always good to be out in front of a big link push by a competitor) and can also help you evaluate your own link campaign or even help you spot a link growth issue that may have resulted in some kind of penalty or over-optimization filter. Now keep in mind that, based on their stated crawling guidelines, the stronger links from stronger sites tend to get crawled more frequently so the spammiest of the spammy link approaches might not get picked up on. For that level of deep research a historical report from Majestic SEO and a link status checker, like Advanced Link Manager, is likely a better bet. You can export this report to Excel or .CSV format. Lost LinksThe Lost Links tab has the same interface as the New Links report does. For your own domain you might want to consider tracking your own links in something like Raven or Buzzstream but this tool does report dropped links down to the day. Combine that with their crawling preferences (better links = quicker attention) and you can spot drops of substance quickly. You can use this report to find links that a competitor has lost, off of which you can contact the webmaster and see if you can't promote your site or similar content to earn the link your competitor was previously getting. You can export this report to Excel or .CSV format. Anchor TextThe anchor text report is exactly what you expect it to be. It lists the anchor texts of external links, the number of occurrences, as well as an expandable dropdown menu to see the pages being linked from and the pages being linked to on the site you are researching. You can export to Excel or .CSV and choose to export everything, up to your limit, or just the current page. Crawled PagesThis report will show you all the pages crawled by Ahrefs with the following stats:
I would likely use this report (on competitors) for checking some of their more popular internally linked-to pages as well as checking out how they structure their site. You can also jump right to a site explorer report for any of the URL's listed on that report as well as check the SERP positions for any of them. Referring DomainsOne thing I like about Ahrefs is that it's straight and to the point. It's very easy to get in, get your data, and get out. Each report does pretty much what you expect it to. This report shows the referring domains + number links coming from that domain. You can access the links from each domain by clicking the Expand button next to the referring domain: SERP PositioningSimilar to SemRush, Ahref's provides estimated ranking data for keyword sets on both Google and Bing/Yahoo in multiple countries (US, UK, AU, DE, FR, ES, IT, BR, RU). The tool shows the:
The other cool thing about this report is that it will tell you the change from the last time they checked the ranking. SERPs AnalysisThis is similar to the SERP positioning report. Essentially, you enter a URL and you get the Google + Bing & Yahoo ranking data with those same metrics as stated above:
In addition to that, you also have the following reports:
Daily StatsThis report shows you, on a daily basis, the following data points:
There are graphical charts for:
History of ChangesThis report breaks down the keyword changes by day and how much the specific keyword moved up/down (and the corresponding page that is ranking). You can look at a daily report, a 7 day report, 30 days, or a custom range. Ads AnalysisAhrefs also incorporates Google (and Bing/Yahoo but I had a hard time getting figures for Bing/Yahoo) PPC data. You can pull in the ranking of the ad, the ad text, volume & CPC data, as well as last updated date & competition levels. You can look at just the keyword/ranking data or choose from their other 2 reports; keywords/ranking + ad text (Table + Ads) or just the PPC ad text itself (Ads Preview). ReportsYou can create reports for your own domain for free or a any other site as a part of your subscription. Each domain counts as a separate report, so you can enter as many as you are entitled to in this interface but they do count against your monthly allowance. The report overview looks like this: Each tab represents a data point you can review. In any tab you can choose to export the visible page or the entire report. There are quite a few filtering options here, as you can see below: Your filtering options, report-wide, are:
The cool thing here is that you can layer on the filters as you wish. The following screenshot shows all filters selected and available: The reporting is really quite powerful and provides numerous ways to quickly filter out junk links so you can focus on the good stuff. LabsThere are 3 additional tools in their Labs section.
Here is a screenshot of the domain comparison feature:The Batch Domains feature looks like this (and is completely exportable!): Ahrefs is Worth a SpinI was impressed with the speed of this tool, the exportability of the data, and the report filtering capabilities. It hardly hurts to have another link database to pull from, especially one that is updated every 30 minutes. The tool is quite easy to use and it does pretty much what you expect it to. If you are into link research you should give this tool a try. The database appears to be a fairly good size for a new database and the ability to slice and dice that data from right within the web interface is a solid feature. If you do try it out, let us know what you think! We are also adding their link data to SEO for Firefox & the SEO Toolbar today. Categories:  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from SEO Book.com To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment