Skip to main content

Backlinks

Inspect every individual link pointing to your site — with full attribute data, link types, and lost backlink history.

Written by Mike

Every Link Pointing to Your Site — with Full Detail

The Backlinks report shows every individual link pointing to the analyzed domain, subfolder, or URL — drawn from Serpstat's 1.1 trillion backlink index. The report combines a dynamics graph with a detailed spreadsheet and includes a separate Lost Backlinks view for links no longer detected during re-crawl.

What you can achieve:

  • Audit link attributes at scale: See every link's type, follow status, and anchor text in one view — identify unnatural patterns or missing Sponsored tags across hundreds of links.

  • Monitor link gains and losses: The dynamics graph and Lost Backlinks toggle let you track exactly when links were gained or lost — and why they disappeared.

  • Benchmark competitor link profiles: Run the report on any competing domain to analyze their link acquisition patterns page by page.

Getting Started

  1. Navigate to Backlink Analysis → Backlinks in the left sidebar.

  2. Enter a domain, subfolder, or URL into the search bar and click Search.

  3. The graph at the top shows active links in green and lost links in red over time.

  4. Scroll down to the spreadsheet. Switch to One per domain mode to deduplicate donors and get a unique domain count.

  5. Click the Lost backlinks toggle in the toolbar to switch to the lost links view. Hover over the Missed badge on any row to see the exact reason the link was removed.

  6. Click Export to download in CSV, XLS, or XLSX.

Key Metrics Explained

  1. Link source / anchor: The page where the link was found, with the anchor text shown below in green.

  2. Link attributes: Follow (indexed, no extra attribute), Nofollow (not followed by bots), UGC (user-generated content), or Sponsored (paid/affiliate).

  3. External links: The total number of unique outgoing links from the source page. A high number dilutes the link equity passed to your site.

  4. Link type: href (standard), redirect, frame, canonical, image, RSS, alternate, or form action.

  5. Domain Rank (SDR): Authority score of the referring domain, 0–100. Values can vary across pages on the same domain due to different crawl dates.

  6. Target page: The URL on the analyzed site that the link points to.

  7. First indexed / Last indexed: Dates when Serpstat first discovered the link and last confirmed it was present.

Pro Tip: Diagnose Lost Backlinks by Reason

The Missed badge tells you not just that a link is gone — it tells you why, which determines your next action.

  1. Switch to the Lost backlinks view.

  2. Hover over the Missed badge on each row. The tooltip shows one of five reasons: URL removed, 4xx/5xx page error, robots.txt restriction, connection issues, or non-HTML content.

  3. For URL removed — reach out to the site owner and request the link be reinstated or updated.

  4. For 4xx errors — check whether the destination page on your site is still live. A redirect may recover the link equity.

⚠️ Important: The Backlinks report draws from Serpstat's 1.1 trillion backlink index — 40% of which is absent in competing tools. The Recrawling URL Tool lets you request a manual re-check of up to 500 URLs per day. Credits are not charged. Unused daily credits do not carry over.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the difference between "One per page" and "One per domain" mode?
​A: "One per page" (default) shows every individual link. "One per domain" collapses links from the same referring domain into a single row — useful for getting a quick count of unique domains without duplicate entries.
​

Q: Why does SDR vary across pages from the same domain?
​A: Each link has its own crawl date. The SDR shown reflects the authority at the time that specific page was last indexed, so values can differ slightly across pages on the same site.
​

Q: What does the "Missed" badge indicate in the Lost Backlinks view?
​A: Missed means the Serpstat crawler visited the source page and did not find the link. Hover over the badge to see the specific reason: URL removed, page error (4xx/5xx), robots.txt restriction, connection issues, or non-HTML content.
​

Next Steps

  • Anchors — Analyze the anchor text distribution across all backlinks to your site.

  • Referring Domains — See unique donor domains with SDR scores and page counts.

  • Top Pages — Find which pages on your site attract the most backlinks.

Did this answer your question?