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Understanding the Backlinks Page
Understanding the Backlinks Page
Patrick McGrane avatar
Written by Patrick McGrane
Updated over a week ago

This video will teach you how to use SpyFu’s Backlinks page, to improve your SEO presence on Google.  Our backlink checker is unique, in that it only gives you safe and reliable backlinks no matter what you search for.

 

Video Transcript:

In this video I’m going to explain how to use the backlinks overview page.

*intro*

The objective of this page is to find the best backlinks to help you rank for important keywords in your market. It’s not an audit. It’s more of a discovery system.

 Let’s get started by going to the backlinks tab and either type in a keyword you’d like to rank on, or the domain of a competitor you would like to emulate.

 Since you generally want good backlinks to help your rank on a keyword, Let’s start with the keyword versio. We display the URLs that are linking to other websites, these links are helping them traffic on this particular keyword.  These URLs are the king-makers, they may not necessarily be ranked highly on this keyword, but they give other sites the link juice theyneed to rise in the ranks.

 This means that you can reach out to these domains and request for your site to be added to the outbound links. (CLICK ON LINK ICON) Get in touch with enough of these domains and you might be surprised at how willing businesses are to link to relevant content.  These connections help strengthen both of your pages in Google’s eyes.

We allow you to filter these results by content type, so if you’re only wanting to focus on Blogs and Forums you can check box them and we’ll only show you those content types.  And with content like Forums, you might even be able to leave a comment with a link to your URL.  

You can filter this down even further if you’d like – for example, if you have a competitor and you want to see how they’re getting traffic directed to them, just enter their domain here.  Or if you are finding domains in this list that you’d rather have filtered out (including your own site) you can exclude them and their pages here.

Regardless of the filters, we find the strongest backlinks available.  But we also know that some outweigh the others. That’s why we include metrics for each individual link. These help you determine which one gets more visits or carries more power in the search results. When you need to prioritize your work, this kind of detail is important.

Details like, how many organic clicks the overall domain or this page are gaining each month.  The domain strength, the strongest sites being ranked at 100.  How many ranked keywords this page has, and the amount of outbound links.  

I personally sort this by outbound links, avoiding sites that have too few or way too many links on their page to be worth my time.  And pursuing the ones that land in that sweet range between 10 and 30-ish links.

This is personal preference though.  Regardless of what backlinks you want to go after, rest assured that all of the ones we display are already indexed by Google.  This tool is not meant to audit full backlink lists, we only display ones that are already ranking in the top 5 pages of google.

A lot of other sites use things like meta-tags to find backlinks, this provides a large quantity of backlinks, but they might not be trusted by google.  If you link your site to one of these un-trusted pages it will actually harm your rankings down the road.  With SpyFu you don’t have to worry about getting these “bad backlinks”

Alright, now I’m going to close the links that I’m not interested in and then export the rest to a CSV to help build out my backlink strategy offline.

You can also dig into a domain’s backlinks.  Enter a direct competitor into the search box and the results will show you where this domain and its pages are getting links from.  Once again, feel free to reach out to these people and see if they will link to your content as well.

Digging into a successful competitor’s information can help you expand your backlink profile with strategies someone else have already proven profitable.  

You can even filter this list by keyword, allowing you to laser focus on your niche, while still gaining inspiration from a competitor.  Meaning if I want to see who is linking to BlueBuffalo.com for the keyword “grain free”, I can do it in seconds.  

The additional filtering and sorting is also in there, making your backlink hunting as customizable as you’d like it to be.

The final thing you may have noticed on these pages is the add button on the far right of all of these backlinks.  This adds these links to your outreach manager in MySpyFu!  MySpyFu helps organize your backlinks into projects, and allows you to find the contact information you need to reach out to these people.  

If you’d like to know more about the Backlinks Outreach Manager, here’s a link to a video that covers it in-depth.

I hope this video will get you on your way to using our backlinks tool.  Now find the keyword focused backlinks, and improve your overall SEO might.

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