07 Jul How Ahrefs.com Got My Attention & Now Not So Much :{
Earlier this year working with a bunch of agencies and clients I decided to try AHREFs and ahrefs.com instead of SEMRush.com, my usual analysis company.
My first experience looking at the AHREFs interface was, wow this is so much better for me personally.
The way the tool works, you can not only monitor a ton of sites for their $99 a month paid version, but you can also place practically any domain in and get somewhat of a Domain Authority, Backlinks history.
This started my backlink journey this year that I have tweeted about so much on https://twitter.com/dgudema if you follow me. I actually started to think with AHREFs that I was understanding backlinks.
I was working on a client, rapidly finding out their DA (Domain Authority) and it has become my new go-to SEO analytics company.
You can see not just the backlinks, but sort by just the backlink domains. You can see the DA going up and down and see the UR going up or down. You can basically use this tool like Moz or SEMRush to figure crap out, but faster and easier I feel.
Also, they have a good, but the sneaky thing where you can add more team members and it really is not clear how much more it will cost you. It just says they can use it, but if they use it too much, you will have to pay something. Wow, that was vague. And apparently, my partner and our part-timers have not abused so we are good. But what if we did abuse it?
Anyway, about 3 months into this, after applying for HARO for clients, trying to get as many DR sites as possible for our niche directories and client sites, and other techniques, like creating infographics, I started to get a malaise. This feeling was really that I felt I was not just making no progress, but AHREFs with all its beautiful reporting (very simple and easy to understand), really is not that in sync with Google.
Take for instance this technique on Google. Search for a domain name of yours with quotes around it, like “seoturbobooster.com”. Then click deep into the search till you pass the domain name links. Actually, those listed there are real backlinks that Google knows about! Isn’t that important.
What concerned me and my partners is those links are not showing up on AHREFs, and probably not any day soon. That’s because AHREFs have to crawl these sites to verify the backlinks. Ok, think about that one.
Meanwhile, I am seeing all these links on Google, SE LA VI, those Google links, because I had a 90+ DR I got on Google, well before AHREFs had a chance to crawl that site, it was removed.
So, what is all this backlink data we are looking at on AHREFs, SEMRush, and MOZ? Well, it can not be perfect in any sense of the word. That’s why they all have different Domain Authority scores!
Anyway, I am still an advocate of AHREFs!
Dan Gudema