Backlink Crawler: Finding Inbound Links to Your Domain

Backlinks — links from other websites pointing to yours — are one of the most significant ranking signals in search engines. ElasticDomain's backlink crawler discovers and indexes inbound links to your domain, giving you visibility into your link profile.

What the Backlink Crawler Does

The crawler:

1. Queries web indexes and crawls discovered pages to find links pointing to your domain
2. Records each backlink with: source URL, anchor text, link type (follow/nofollow), and discovery date
3. Stores the data in your workspace for trend tracking
4. Identifies new backlinks (gained since last crawl) and lost backlinks (previously found, now removed)

Setting Up Backlink Crawling

1. Go to the domain detail page.
2. Click Backlinks in the tabs.
3. Click Start Crawl to trigger an initial backlink discovery run.

The crawl runs as a background job. Results appear in the Backlinks tab as the crawler processes URLs.

Reading the Backlink Report

Overview Metrics

• Total backlinks — total inbound links found
• Referring domains — number of unique domains linking to you (more important than raw link count)
• New links — discovered since last crawl
• Lost links — previously found but now removed or changed

Per-Backlink Data

Field	Description
Source URL	The page containing the link
Source domain	The domain of the linking page
Anchor text	The clickable text of the link
Link type	Follow (passes link equity) or Nofollow
First seen	When this backlink was first discovered
Last checked	When the backlink was last confirmed as present

Filtering

Filter backlinks by:

• Follow vs nofollow
• Source domain (see all links from a specific site)
• Anchor text (find links with specific anchor patterns)
• Date range (new links in last 30 days)

Why Backlinks Matter

Follow links pass "link equity" (PageRank) from the linking page to your page. A link from a high-authority site (major news outlet, industry publication, government or education domain) carries significantly more ranking weight than a link from a low-authority blog.

Nofollow links do not pass link equity but still drive referral traffic and contribute to brand awareness.

Using Backlink Data for SEO

Find your best links: Sort by source domain authority to identify your most valuable backlinks. Protect these relationships.

Identify lost links: Regularly check for lost backlinks. If a key link disappears, reach out to the site owner to restore it.

Anchor text analysis: Anchor text diversity is important. If 80% of your backlinks use the same exact-match anchor text, that looks unnatural to search engines.

Competitive gap analysis: Compare your backlink profile to a competitor (add their domain and run a crawl) to find link sources they have that you do not.

Tips

• Run backlink crawls monthly — link profiles change gradually
• Focus on the number of unique referring domains, not raw link count
• A sudden drop in backlinks (many lost at once) can indicate a technical issue on the linking site or a Google penalty situation worth investigating