Backlinks
6,725 links from 6 domains is not 6,725 endorsements
Domains first, not the biggest number: links from your own sites labelled, and the domains you lost since last week.
The number every other tool leads with
A backlink count is the largest figure in the report and the least useful one. One site-wide link in a footer produces one link per page of the site that carries it, so a single placement on a 6,000-page site arrives as 6,000 backlinks.
The page that shows you 6,000 and stops is not wrong. It is just not telling you that it was one decision by one person.
Domains first, and the arithmetic said out loud
The strip leads with referring domains, not backlinks. When the two disagree by more than twentyfold the page says, in a sentence, that this is a site-wide placement rather than that many endorsements. It is the rule the health score already follows: a rate rather than a count, with the arithmetic on screen.
What it actually tells you
Who is new since last week
Named, not counted. A count tells you something happened; the name tells you who, which is the half you can act on.
Who you lost
The same comparison in the other direction, from our own two most recent snapshots rather than from the vendor's summary.
Which links are your own
A row from a site on your own account is labelled. A profile built from your own network is a different thing from one built by other people.
What each domain is worth
Link count, the index's own domain rank, and a spam score per referring domain, so a hundred links from nowhere do not read like ten from somewhere.
What it will not tell you
It will not tell you that a link caused a ranking, because nothing can. It will not tell you whether a redirect was permanent or temporary, because the index it reads does not record that, and it will not call a domain that redirects to you an endorsement - it counts it and says what it is.
And it does not promise every link in the index. For a large profile it stores the thousand heaviest referring domains and prints the real total beside them - a limit with a number on it rather than a silence.
Questions
- Every Monday, and once immediately when you add a site - so a site added on Tuesday is not waiting until the following week to show anything. You can also check by hand, once a day. That limit is not a way of selling you more: backlink indexes do not move faster than a day, so a second check would spend a call to write the same answer.
- Every paid plan, from Starter. Free does not include it. Unlike a crawl, which costs us machine time we already have, every backlink check is billed by an index vendor per lookup - so this is one of the few things here that has to sit behind a paid plan to exist at all.
- A commercial link index. Nobody builds one from a crawl of your site - knowing who links to you requires a link graph of the whole web, which is why every tool in this market either owns an index or rents one. We rent, and we say so.
- For a large profile we store the thousand heaviest referring domains rather than all of them, and the page says the real total beside the list. The thousandth domain by link count is not the one anybody is looking for, and fetching hundreds of thousands of rows every week would cost more than the feature is worth.
- They are counted, because they are real links, and they are labelled. A row from a domain on your own account carries a “your own site” tag, so a profile made mostly of your own network cannot read as one made of other people's recommendations.
- Yes, for the competitors you audit. Their profile is fetched on the same weekly schedule as yours, the comparison page shows referring domains and domain rank side by side, and a list of the domains linking to them and not to you, best-ranked first.
- Both. The domains view is the summary; the links view lists each source page with its anchor text, whether it follows, and the road it takes when it reaches you through another domain that redirects here. Redirecting domains get their own view, and any link row can be asked who links to that page in turn.
Start free
One site and 100 credits - up to 200 pages a scan, about 5 scans, and the whole report. No card. Paid plans add more sites, bigger crawls and the AI rewrites.