This document discusses how to analyze competitors' backlinks. It makes several assumptions about common backlink metrics and how to interpret them. It provides data on the distribution of backlinks across different platforms and topics. It also gives recommendations on how to estimate referring domain quality, determine the appropriate number of pages that should receive links, and find sources for good quality backlinks.

1. How to analyze your
competitors' backlinks
Alex Danilin
Lead Product Manager

2. We are going to talk about ...
● Assumptions behind common backlinks metrics
● Links' distributions
● How to get good links

3. How did we get the data?
Serpstatbot/1.0 (advanced backlink tracking bot; http://serpstatbot.com/;
abuse@serpstatbot.com)

4. How did we get the data?
● http://serpstatbot.com/ - for more details on our bot
● abuse@serpstatbot.com - mail us if you would like your site to be blacklisted
The bot is very polite. If your site starts 50Xing under these conditions (~50
simultaneous users), then you have a problem.

5. Assumption 1. You can block all bots

6. Assumption 2. External backlink definition
help.remove.bg -> remove.bg
OR
play.google.com -> ads.google.com

7. Assumption 3. Indexable internet is huge
~90M domains in Google
~180M with subdomains
Platform External backlinks
Blogspot 107B
Tumblr 16B
Wordpress 4B

8. What is in non-indexable part of internet?
● casino, pharma etc.
● mirrors
● parked domains
● empty domains

9. Assumption 4. Number of backlinks and referring domains
are a good proxy for building links profile
Depends on:
● crawl depth
● sitewide links
● blogs hosting platforms
Better to use number of linking hosts.

10. These domains get ~12% of all links
● facebook.com
● twitter.com
● google.com
● instagram.com
● linkedin.com
● pinterest.com
● vk.com
● goo.gl
● tumblr.com
● yandex.ru

11. Assumption 5. Backlinks history is objective
Depends on:
● site is blocked for crawling
● date of crawling is not a date of appearance
● response code while crawling

12. A single domain was lost

13. Distributions in different topics
Essay Electronics
Avg # of ref domains 8 530 3 919
Avg # of ref links 562 865 51 986
Commercial anchors 48,85% 12,90%
Other anchors 51,15% 87,10%

14. Top domains by redirect backlinks
Full list is here
Domain # of redirects
hugedomains.com 270823
blogger.com 58687
shortener.secureserver.net 48727
en.wordpress.com 44775
survey-smiles.com 25036
facebook.com 21993
afternic.com 21591
domainmarket.com 21398
reg.ru 17981
wix.com 15780

15. Top domains by subdomains
Domain # of subdomains
tumblr.com 10345763
blogspot.com 7323721
wordpress.com 2805267
zluykrf.com 2475099
cialis-twstore.com.tw 1610569
gm9.com 1047766
teeldzj.com 924449
6-china.com 916711
appstor.io 797539
ctoqbqt.com 779513
nurusie.com 761285
sorreldifusion.com 749250

16. site:0cr18ni.com

17. What are spammy domains?
● A lot of external backlinks per page
● Spammy content
● Links to malicious websites
● Spammy external anchor list
Full list is here.

18. What follow vs nofollow (%) distribution should I use?

19. What is the min amount of pages that should receive links on
my website?
Number of target URLs vs Keywords in top100
URLs
Keywords

20. A simple approximation for the number of target URLs
Number of target pages = 0.00177 * number of keywords in top10

21. Referring domain quality estimation
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/serpstat-batch-analysis/aonpihdkki
inindoogbplckpdcodnngk

22. Same tool to find quality referring pages

23. Links distribution by keywords’ volume
Correlation for referring domains = 0.01482301
Correlation for referring pages = 0.0301808
Keywords volume Referring domains Referring pages
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q1 Q2 Q3
High 2.75 24 193.25 4.75 68.5 2150
Middle, Low 1 1 2 1 1 5

24. Where can I get good links?
Top 50 free sources

25. Alex Danilin
alex_danilin
alex.danilin.m
a.danilin@serpstat.com