Since they switched to their "new and improved" site explorer Ahrefs can't find shit anymore. Even their old database had more than triple the amount of backlinks.... time to look ...again.... for a new provider!
What's going on with Ahrefs
- Thread starter OpLeads
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Looks like I spoke too soon when I said a while ago that the new update and API was going to be badass. Definitely seeing huge drops in the amount of backlinks reported...
Found around 20k for one site before, right now 1.2k ^^ Looks pretty much useless now.
Have you done an Excel dump of the data and compared the quality of the reported backlinks? I'm getting a lot less trash links after the update. Granted, it's still less links overall after cleaning than before, but they appear to be more current as well. Perhaps they changed the age of the links they're keeping in their DB.
It seems as if the Site Explorer started a fresh count when they switched their service. So what you see notw is what they found since December 12. However, I found that when you run a (standard) report - under the reports tab - they still include the old database. And that looks about right. So I might have screamed too early, but please let me know what anyone else finds.
We'd like to comment on this situation. Our aim is to become #1 provider on backlinks info.
Having analysed main demands for such a service, we pointed out 3 main directions:
Quality of data (no garbage, doubles, old deleted links, etc);
Update frequency (how quickly changes get into index);
Index size.
None of our competitors managed to unite these three directions.
Now market offers:
Large index with lots of garbage and absence of recent updates.
Medium index with less garbage with more regular updates.
Small index with good data quality but very rare updates.
We plan to unite quality, speed and large index. Much time and resources were needed to research, develop and optimize the system so that to get quality, speed and size in one single index.
You can easily check what we mean under speed. Take any article for today from some news sites like CNN or BBC and try to find links to it. Ahrefs.com is likely to be the only one to do this.
The only considerable drawback for now is the index size. But this is temporal inconvenience. Every day info from about 500mln new pages is added to our index. That is, approximately in a fortnight index will contain about 10billion pages. In a month we'll be the best source of backlinks info by all parameters.
Having analysed main demands for such a service, we pointed out 3 main directions:
Quality of data (no garbage, doubles, old deleted links, etc);
Update frequency (how quickly changes get into index);
Index size.
None of our competitors managed to unite these three directions.
Now market offers:
Large index with lots of garbage and absence of recent updates.
Medium index with less garbage with more regular updates.
Small index with good data quality but very rare updates.
We plan to unite quality, speed and large index. Much time and resources were needed to research, develop and optimize the system so that to get quality, speed and size in one single index.
You can easily check what we mean under speed. Take any article for today from some news sites like CNN or BBC and try to find links to it. Ahrefs.com is likely to be the only one to do this.
The only considerable drawback for now is the index size. But this is temporal inconvenience. Every day info from about 500mln new pages is added to our index. That is, approximately in a fortnight index will contain about 10billion pages. In a month we'll be the best source of backlinks info by all parameters.
Thank you for following and keeping us updated. We look forward to when you have bugs fixed and the tool is on par with some of the top back-link analyzers, spyglass, etc..Would love to support however possible.
+Rep
+Rep
They're saying that "to test" how quickly they're picking up new and still relevant backlinks "now", check it on a news site that pushes out new articles all the time where old articles are also quickly forgotten about. i.e., their archive count of backlinks will be what you were use to expecting relatively soon as it continues to crawl and will then outshine their competition.
Yeah, the broken English and terms are confusing, but that's what I took away from the comment.
What he meant is that Ahrefs is indexing backlinks much quicker now. And good way of proving that is by taking a fresh article published by any major news site.
I know what he meant. It was more a crack than a question. I deff need to be much clearer when sarcasm enters the room
As far as accurate backlink profiles, I'm seeing better results from OSE than Majestic or Ahrefs.
So did ahrefs get sold or do you carry on with it now? I saw it on Flippa some weeks ago so I was not sure what to expect. I like the anchor text tab, this is what makes a huge difference to the other backlink checkers.
I'd give them a week or two before they're back up to full steam. They started the index from scratch a short while ago, and they're apparently spidering 500,000,000 a day at this point.