Competitor Backlinks

What this check looks at

Competitor Backlinks is one of the Off-Page SEO checks. Authority earned outside the site. It is judged from what your site served at the time of the crawl, and a page we could not reach is reported as unreachable rather than skipped.

What this one needs to run

This check depends on a commercial data set. Backlink graphs, keyword volume and difficulty scores are crawled and licensed by a handful of vendors, and there is no way to derive them from your own site.

This check needs a paid data feed, so it is listed here with what it would read and why it matters. A catalogue that quietly omits what it cannot do is a catalogue you cannot trust. You are never billed for a check that did not run, and it is not counted in any plan.

What runs instead

• 73 of the 77 catalogued checks run today, and none of them needs external data
• Answer engine access, rendering and schema value checks cover the ground that decides citation
• If backlink data matters to your work, a dedicated backlink tool will serve you better than a bolt on

What would have to happen for this to run

This one is a purchasing decision rather than a technical one. The check is straightforward to write; what it needs is a data set that costs more per month than most of our plans do, and passing that cost on for a check few people asked for would be the wrong trade.

1. We license a backlink or keyword index from a vendor that crawls the wider web
2. The check queries that index for your domain and compares it against what we crawled
3. Until then it names the data set it would read, rather than returning an empty result that looks like a clean bill of health

Where it sits in the audit

See every off-page check or the full catalogue of 77 checks. The documentation covers the order checks run in and how a finding is fingerprinted, and the about page explains why we publish the checks that do not run.