Backlink profile health check

Link count is a vanity metric. What matters is how many distinct domains link to you, how authoritative they are, and whether the anchor text looks natural.

Steps

1. Get the baseline. Call ahrefs.domain_overview for the target to establish domain rating and organic traffic. Everything below is read relative to this.

2. Pull referring domains. ahrefs.referring_domains with order_by on domain rating descending, limit: 200. Referring domains matter far more than total backlinks: 500 links from 5 sites is a much weaker profile than 100 links from 100 sites.

3. Pull individual backlinks for anchor analysis. ahrefs.backlinks with limit: 500 ordered by source domain rating. Aggregate anchor text into buckets: branded, exact-match commercial, partial-match, generic ("click here", "read more"), and naked URL.

4. Look for concentration risk. Compute what share of links come from the single largest referring domain, and from the top 5. A profile where one domain supplies most of the links is fragile: losing it moves rankings.

5. Compare against a competitor if one is named. Run steps 1–2 for the competitor. Referring-domain count and average domain rating are the two numbers worth comparing directly.

6. Report. Lead with: total referring domains, median domain rating, share of links from the top domain, and the anchor-text distribution. Then flag anything anomalous.

Gotchas

• A high exact-match anchor share is a risk signal. Natural profiles are dominated by branded and generic anchors. If exact-match commercial anchors are a large share, say so plainly. It's the classic footprint of paid or manipulated links.
• Don't recommend disavowing on this data alone. Ahrefs shows links, not penalties. Flag suspicious patterns for human review; disavow files cause real damage when applied carelessly.
• New links take weeks to appear in any third-party index. Absence of a recent link isn't evidence it doesn't exist.
• Dofollow vs nofollow matters for authority, but nofollow links from high-traffic sites still drive referral visits. Don't dismiss them outright.
• To grow the profile rather than audit it, continue with competitor-new-backlinks: the sites linking to competitors right now are the prospect list.