SEO
Backlinks
Who links to your site. A backlink is a link from someone else’s page to one of yours; search engines read them as votes, and the more trusted the voter the more the vote is worth.
By Garvit Sharma, Co-founder
SEO → Backlinks
| You see | It means |
|---|---|
Live backlinks | Links that were there on the latest sweep. |
Lost | Links a sweep stopped seeing — the page changed, or was taken down. |
Referring domains | How many different websites link to you. Ten links from one site are one vote; ten from ten sites are ten. |
Nofollow | Links the linking site has marked as not an endorsement. They still bring visitors. |
From, Anchor | The page that links to you, and the words it used for the link. |
Authority | How trusted the linking page is, on a 0–1000 scale. Higher is better; a handful of high-authority links outweighs hundreds of low ones. |
First seen | When Vidrys first recorded the link. |
Links to pages that no longer exist
After every weekly refresh, Vidrys checks what each page other sites link to answers. Links to pages that no longer exist lists the ones that now answer with an error — each link sends its visitors to a dead end and its value to nothing — with the sites linking to it and a page to redirect it to: the live page whose address shares the most with the dead one, else the home page. A 301 from the dead address wins both back.
Where to get links
Where to get links names the pages to ask, the way Across the web names the sites AI cites. Two kinds of page are listed, best first:
| Page | Why it is listed |
|---|---|
| Links to your competitors, not to you | Every Tuesday, after the backlink refresh, Vidrys asks which pages link to your competitors’ websites (up to five of them — the ones sharing the most of your tracked keywords’ results pages first) and not to yours. A page that already lists two of your rivals lists vendors, so asking to be added is an ordinary request. Only followed links count, and Site authority is the site’s trust on the same 0–1000 scale as Authority. |
| Ranks on Google for your keywords | Third-party pages on the first page of Google for a keyword, read when you start its brief. A round-up or review that ranks for the search is read by the people making it. |
| Mentions you without a link | Once a month Vidrys searches the web for pages that name your brand, opens each one, and lists those that don’t link to you — Ask … to link its mention of you, with what the page says. They already know you, so these are the easiest links to win, and they come first. |
Each card says what to do — Get into “…” on techradar.com, Claim your profile on g2.com, Reply in “…” on reddit.com — what kind of site it is, who decides (You add it, An editor decides, Join in), and why it is listed. Pages nobody can be asked for are left out: encyclopedias, research papers, government sites, retailers and other companies’ own pages. Forum, social, video and open-publishing links are usually nofollow, and the card says so: they bring visitors, not ranking credit.
A site Vidrys has no rule for is read once by SEO’s own checker — who publishes it, whether it sells what you sell, and what link it could carry — so a magazine’s round-up is listed and a rival’s own blog is not. If a listed site does compete with you, press This site competes with us: its pages leave the list, and undo brings them back. These are SEO’s own calls; what AI visibility decided about a site never changes this list.
Not for us hides a page; it stays under that heading so you can restore it. A page that starts linking to you moves to Linking to you now. Check now runs the competitor check without waiting for Tuesday, once a day; it needs at least one competitor with a website (Settings → Competitors). The same pages appear in a keyword brief under Where to get links, and on a published keyword card next to Build links to.
Your link profile in depth
Once a month, after the weekly refresh, Vidrys reads the profile in depth: the strongest sites linking to you (rank on a 0–1,000 scale), the words they link with, linking sites month by month since 2019, and how your links and linking sites compare with each competitor on Competitors.
Links that may count against you
Links that may count against you lists linking sites with signs of spam — a high spam score, hundreds of links from one weak site, an address type spam networks favour — as Toxic or Suspicious. Google ignores most of these by itself; disavow only the ones you are sure of. Disavow puts a site on your list, Download disavow file saves it in Google’s format, and you upload that file in Search Console’s disavow tool. Vidrys never sends it anywhere.
Whose job is it
Vidrys finds the pages and watches the links; it does not ask for them. The outreach stays with you or your agency — the pitch to the editor, the profile, the reply in the thread. The pages from the Content queue are what makes a page worth linking to.
Refreshed every Tuesday for your website — Search Console is not needed — so the first profile lands within a week. A Lost link can lag the web by a few days. On a site with a very large profile, new links are added but none are marked lost, because the index cannot be read in full.