Ahrefs: optimising your netlinking strategy
Majestic SEO’s competitor
Ahrefs is an online backlink analysis service launched in 2011. It was developed by several Ukrainian computer scientists and has gradually become a major competitor to the other tools available, Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO.
Ahrefs is useful for webmarketers or link building agencies who work on the link building of several websites on a daily basis, and for webmasters who do everything they can to increase their site’s audience. In 2014, it is becoming increasingly important to control link acquisition on the web.
Backlinks can have a positive or negative impact on the positioning of a site’s pages in search engine results. Google Webmaster Tools is a free tool that helps to identify some of the backlinks obtained on the web. But it is not exhaustive, so it is preferable to turn to solutions such as Majestic SEO or Ahrefs.
So should you use Ahrefs and how much does it cost?
The free version is too limited for people who want to monitor the results of their link building work on a very regular basis. The first paid version costs around 60 euros a month, which is more than enough for SEO experts. With Ahrefs, they can analyze a URL, a domain or a sub-domain and discover all the backlinks crawled by the tool.
It shows the backlinks obtained and the links lost. It also categorises them (specifying whether they are Dofollow or Nofollow in particular) and reveals the anchor ratio, which is all the more important when it comes to ensuring that your link profile is varied. The so-called ‘professional’ version, priced at 60 euros, also provides some very interesting information about activity on the various social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus).
Like all other successful tools, it has the functionality to create analysis reports and export data in CSV format.
As well as being able to monitor your link building, this service will enable you to spy on your competitors’ backlinks and refine your own link building strategy. Ahrefs is also very useful for checking whether negative SEO work has been carried out against your site, as well as taking stock of the situation when you take over the SEO of a new blog or online shop.
Finally, you should know that the crawls are fast, so the tool is a pleasure to use, especially as it is very intuitive.
