We got obsessed with referring domains over absolute number of backlinks a couple of years ago, so it’s kind of a pain when you want to look at anchor text percentages by referring domain instead of absolute number of backlinks.

I love using Ahrefs, so I decided to see how flexible they could be by submitting a support request:

On the anchor text link report you calculate the percentages by absolute number of backlinks. If you place one sitewide it skews the whole report. You would be the only service to offer this and it is a BIG deal to a lot of SEO’s who understand referring domains is more important than number of backlinks. Could you give us an option to switch to referring domains, where the percentage is based on referring domain counts and is ordered by referring domain count?

Low and behold, they did! I was very impressed – a great example of Zendesk in action (thanks Anna if you are reading).

So without further a do, here is the difference:

As you can see from above, it’s ordering the anchor text by total number of back links – this means if you have one site wide link on 10,000 pages of the same site it’s going to skew your link profile. Which do you think is more relevant – one site linking out of many pages with the same anchor text or two sites linking each from one page with the same anchor text? (Of course a site wide passes more page rank, but nowadays a site wide anchor text link of “seo” looks a bit suspect).

So here is it ordered according to referring domains:

I find this report really helpful – in the past getting this kind of data would take quite some time, so I’m pleased to be able to access this at a touch of a button.