Who links to your website, and which links are broken
Any paid plan 4 minute read
Who it is for: Anyone looking for a quick, defensible first win.
Pull the backlink data for a site and you get the referring domains, the links themselves, and a separate list of links pointing at pages of yours that no longer work. The second list is the one worth acting on first.
Why it matters
A large backlink number tells you very little, and the links quietly costing you something are the ones pointing at pages that have stopped existing.
What to do
- Backlink profile — who links to you. Referring domains, total backlinks, and a spam score. Read the domain count rather than the link count: a thousand links from one site is one relationship.
- Broken backlinks — links you are losing today. Links from other sites pointing at pages of yours that return an error. Somebody has already done the hard part; the page they pointed at simply moved or went.
- Fix the broken ones with redirects. Each one is a redirect away from working again. This is the cheapest link work there is, because the link already exists.
What you get back
The sites that vouch for you, and a list of links that are currently going nowhere.
How to make money from it
Broken backlinks are the easiest first win on a new client. The links were already earned, the fix is a redirect, and the result is defensible in a way that most link work is not.
Worth knowing. Authority scores are a provider's model, not Google's. They are useful for sorting one domain against another and should not be quoted to a client as a fact about their site.
This one needs a paid plan. What each plan includes.