Backlinks remain the strongest currency in organic rankings, and Ahrefs operates one of the largest link indexes in the industry. Getting value from how to use Ahrefs for backlink analysis means knowing which Site Explorer report answers which question: who links to you, who stopped, who links to rivals but ignores you, and whether your anchors are quietly signalling trouble.
The interface rewards a report-by-report habit over dashboard wandering. Below is the sequence practitioners actually run, from broad profile health down to individual outreach prospects — equally applicable to your own domain and to any competitor you care to study.
Quick Answer: Paste any domain into Site Explorer, judge overall health in the Overview graphs, drill into Backlinks and Referring Domains for specifics, monitor New and Lost reports for momentum, and finish with Link Intersect to build a prospect list of sites linking to competitors but not to you.
Overview First: Profile Health at a Glance
The Overview charts referring domains and estimated organic traffic together. Divergence between the lines tells stories: rising links alongside flat traffic suggests links arriving from irrelevant or deindexed sources; falling referring domains with stable traffic suggests the losses carried no weight anyway. Domain Rating appears here too — a relative 0–100 measure useful for comparisons between sites, meaningless as an absolute target.
The Backlinks Report: Every Individual Link
Each row shows the linking page, its target URL, anchor text, DR and the linker's estimated organic traffic. Filters atop the report do the analytical lifting:
- Dofollow/nofollow, language, platform and TLD filters segment any profile within seconds.
- Anchor text sorting exposes manipulation instantly — a casino affiliate whose anchors uniformly read like essay-writing services is waving a red flag, and if that describes your own profile after aggressive link purchasing, scrutiny tends to follow.
- Link type breakdowns separate editorial mentions from image, form, redirect and directory placements.
Aggressive operators mine this same report to reverse-engineer competitor link purchases. The durable lesson applies regardless of ethics: anchors skewed far from natural distributions attract manual reviews, and recovering from link-based penalties routinely consumes quarters, not days — sometimes ending in deindexing altogether.
Referring Domains: Where the Weight Actually Lives
Search engines weight unique domains far more than repeated links from one source — fifty endorsements from a single site never equal fifty independent vouches. Sort this report by DR descending to identify who really backs the property, and enable the one-link-per-domain toggle to simulate that weighting. Platform tags (blogs, news, forums, wikis) characterise composition for benchmarking against healthier profiles.
New and Lost Reports: Momentum Diagnostics
These time-bound views answer a single question — what changed? Lost referring domains correlate suspiciously well with traffic drops, so check them before blaming algorithms. New links verify outreach delivery: contact forty webmasters this month and this report names the ones who came through. Watching a competitor's new-link velocity likewise reveals which tactics currently earn links in your niche.
Link Intersect: Turning Gaps Into Prospects
- Enter several competitor domains as sources and your own as the target.
- Export sites linking to them but not to you — pre-qualified by demonstrated willingness.
- Prioritize by topical relevance first, authority second, then pitch referencing the specific page they linked.
| Report | Question It Answers | Action It Triggers |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | Is the whole profile trending healthy? | Investigate divergence between links and traffic |
| Backlinks | Who links, from which anchors? | Audit anchors; flag manipulative patterns early |
| Referring Domains | Which sites carry the authority? | Benchmark composition; chase domain-level wins |
| New/Lost | What changed recently? | Diagnose drops; confirm outreach delivered |
| Link Intersect | Who links to rivals but skips me? | Feed the outreach pipeline |
Key Takeaways
- Judge profiles by referring-domain trends, never raw link counts.
- Anchor distribution is the fastest manipulation detector available anywhere.
- New/Lost reports explain traffic changes faster than algorithm speculation.
- Link Intersect converts competitor intelligence directly into outreach lists.