Reading a backlink profile: a worked example

This document is from lectures taught by Dr Shahid.

A real referring-page export for one site's backlink profile, from Ahrefs' subdomain-level report, the same kind of report Competitor backlink analysis describes reading. Each row is one page that links to the analyzed site.¹

How to read the columns

• Referring page URL: the exact page carrying the backlink, not just the domain.
• DR (Domain Rating): the referring domain's own authority.
• Domain Traffic: that domain's estimated total organic traffic, not the traffic of this one page.
• Linked Domains: how many distinct external domains that page links out to.
• External Links: the total count of outbound links on that page (higher than Linked Domains when a page links to the same external domain more than once).¹

A page with a high Linked Domains / External Links count is sharing its link authority across many other sites at once: a backlink from a page like that is diluted compared to one from a page that links out sparingly.

The top 50 referring pages by DR

Reading the pattern

Almost every high-DR referring page in this profile is a university blog comment section (sites.uw.edu, blogs.uoregon.edu, edspace.american.edu, sites.gsu.edu, and similar .edu subdomains), a forum thread, or an old CGI-based Japanese blog/forum (asahi-net.or.jp, wakwak.com, kcn.ne.jp), not homepages or editorial articles. This matches Off-page SEO fundamentals's own Foundation backlinks and Blog comments / Forum backlinks categories directly: university course-blog platforms in particular tend to run high domain authority (from the parent .edu domain) while leaving comment sections open to anyone, which is exactly the combination (high DR, low moderation) that makes a page a repeatable backlink target rather than a one-off.¹

Footnotes

1. Backlink SUB DOMAIN iSkills Dr Shahid.xlsx, iSkills course material. ↩ ↩² ↩³