How To Find Up To 44% More Referring Domains: Comparing Serpstat and Ahrefs Backlink Indexes

Mike Zlatov

Customer Support Specialist at Serpstat

We've just released our backlink index and became the fifth service in the world with such a feature. At the moment, we have 1 trillion backlinks for 160 million domains. But is this amount enough for a qualitative analysis of backlinks?

We did a little research and compared the base of our backlink index with the famous leader in the niche - Ahrefs. Read on to see what results we got. Let's analyze the links!

Methodology and results of backlink index databases comparison

There are fewer backlink indexes in the world than the search engines themselves. This means that most services use backlinks that they buy from a third party. Such indexes are challenging to scale and improve since all changes are on the side of the supplier company. We solved this problem for our users by developing our own link analysis tool.

For SEO specialists, it is essential to control the appearance and quality of backlinks, evaluate donor sites, and anchor lists. But this is impossible without a complete base for the analysis of links and link donors. Without a comprehensive link analysis, something will likely be overlooked. We compared our backlink index with a strong competitor to evaluate the completeness of our data.

Most Wanted: We Launched Our Own Link Index With New Architecture

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Ahrefs base currently stands at 1.8 trillion backlinks (on the market since 2011), while the Serpstat index, existing for less than six months, has already covered 1 trillion and continues to increase volumes. Just appreciate this pace - every day Serpstatbot adds 2 billion new links and crawls 2.5 million domains per day.
We compared the number of sites that link to 10 randomly selected domains in different niches.

Then we analyzed them in the mentioned services - we collected data from each service for each domain, namely, the number of links and referring donor sites. Since it is crucial for SEO specialists to have relevant and complete data about backlinks of their website or competitors, we also found out what proportion of unique links (i.e., those that are not found by a competitor) are found by services.
Comparing the found backlinks for the analyzed domains, we saw that up to 44% of the referring domains in the Serpstat index are unique, i.e., they are not in the Ahrefs database.

An example table. The number of referring domains to the analyzed domains (03/20/2020)

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Serpstat Backlink Index benefits

Not only the number of backlinks matters. It is also essential to understand how relevant is the data provided by service as well as the size of the database. Therefore, the maximum result can be achieved only if you combine several services to analyze backlinks.

The Serpstat Backlink Index is actively expanding and regularly updating the database. Here are 5 of our competitive advantages:

Unique index architecture. We don't separate historical and fresh data, which saves time on updating and comparing new and old data, as happens in the classic backlink indexes. The data is stored in one place, so you always have an up-to-date picture of the project's backlinks. Information in the backlink index is fully updated within 80 days.

Detecting links from malicious sites. So far, only the total number of such links is available, but in future updates, the functions will be expanded.

Links from blog platforms (e.g., Blogspot, Wordpress, uCoz) are updated daily, which simplifies the tasks of crowd marketing and outreach. By adapting the crawling depth to the host performance and flexible selection of the start points of the scan, we completely bypass useful sites and do not fit into an infinite number of doorways.

The speed of the index. This architecture simplifies the processing of queries to the index database, which positively affects the speed of working with reports.

Filters and sorting. The index with the new architecture introduces filters and sortings, which will simplify the work with the service.

Despite the competition, all backlink analysis tools are useful. The larger the base they have, the better. However, don't forget about the quality of the data provided, and the fact that we have up to 44% of unique links compared to a competitor ;) So, combine services and conquer SERP!

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