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23 posts in guides
how to track chatgpt traffic in ga4
Build a session-based AI referral report, review source aliases, and keep visits separate from citations, first touch and purchase attribution.
backlink api rate limits: safe retries
Handle monthly quotas, Retry-After headers and ambiguous timeouts with a bounded Python retry planner that avoids duplicate backlink jobs.
competitor backlink analysis template
download a 35-column CSV worksheet, qualify competitor link gaps, and use five hypothetical examples to choose the next research action.
export backlinks to csv without losing context
save a useful backlink dataset, distinguish domain rows from page links, and convert api json to csv with a provenance sidecar.
link reclamation: repair earned backlinks
Verify the original link, diagnose the break, then choose a content repair, equivalent redirect or specific editorial correction.
backlink monitoring: a change ledger workflow
Compare named snapshots, verify important source pages, and turn backlink changes into a review queue with an auditable change ledger.
lost backlinks: verify before reclaiming
a missing backlink row can mean a crawl gap, an inaccessible page or a removed link. use an evidence ladder to decide what to fix.
backlink crawling tools: choose the right one
site crawlers audit your pages. backlink indexes find domains linking to a target. choose between them and understand Common Crawl's limits.
what is link building - the honest, short version
getting other sites to link to yours, why the count stopped mattering, and the three approaches that still work sorted by how much of your time they waste.
toxic backlinks and the disavow file - the unpopular, accurate version
toxic is a vendor word, not a google one. what the score actually is, the narrow case where disavow is correct, and why the default answer is to do nothing.
nofollow links - what they are, whether they help, and why some tools cannot see them
rel=nofollow became a hint in 2019, not a directive. what that changed, when to use sponsored and ugc instead, and the layer problem behind link-attribute reporting.
anchor text, explained - what it is, what it signals, and where it actually pays
the clickable words of a link are an independent description of your page. here is why that matters, what a natural profile looks like, and why internal anchors are the half worth working on.
how to find keyword cannibalization in search console (with a real diagnosis)
the aggregate report cannot show it. query+page pairs can. here is the query that finds it, and 44 cannibalized queries found on our own site.
answer engine optimization: what actually makes a page citable
aeo, geo, and llm seo mostly describe the same job. here is the part that is genuinely different from ordinary seo, and what we ship on our own site.
moz's crawler explained: dotbot, rogerbot, and the crawled flag
moz runs two crawlers: dotbot builds the link index behind DA, rogerbot runs site crawl in a moz pro campaign. what crawled means and why DA moves.
programmatic backlink research: 5 api recipes
crawlgraph's backlink API returns referring domains from named Common Crawl graph snapshots. A free key includes 15 backlink lookups and 0 gap analyses per UTC month; paid core plans include 1,000 backlink calls and 50 gap analyses. The API supports backlink lookup, gap analysis, outreach targets, release metadata, CSV and JSON workflows, and hosted MCP access.
watch: steal your competitor's backlinks (free 2-minute walkthrough)
a short walkthrough of crawlgraph's free gap analysis: find every site linking to your competitor but not you, pull the contact email, and send the pitch - without an ahrefs or semrush subscription.
find link building prospects with ai
connect an ai assistant to a live backlink data source over mcp and let it run gap analysis, rank outreach targets, and draft angles - no spreadsheet wrangling.
google search console backlinks: what it shows
gsc is the only free backlink data source straight from google - but it caps the report at ~1,000 referring domains, only shows data for sites you've verified, and surfaces a filtered subset of what google actually indexed. here's the full walkthrough plus how to get around the limits.
bing webmaster tools backlinks (free, no signup)
bing webmaster tools shows backlink data for free - and unlike google search console, it surfaces backlinks for sites you don't own through the similar sites report. here's the full walkthrough, the gsc comparison, and the export workflow.
how long does google take to count a backlink?
"how long for google to count a backlink" is actually three questions: how long to crawl, how long to index, and how long for it to influence rankings. the answers are days, weeks, and months - and each phase has different bottlenecks.
referring domain vs backlink - the difference
a backlink is one link. a referring domain is one site - it can give you ten thousand links and still count as one. the two counts describe different aspects of a link profile; neither alone establishes link quality or ranking impact.
how to get backlinks for free in 2026
free options for surveying a backlink profile - gsc, bing webmaster, crawlgraph's free tier - and what each one actually shows. for full lists, paid once.