How to use the Anchors report

In this report, we show the anchors of all internal and external links on a target website, subdomain (e.g., blog.domain.com), subfolder (e.g., domain.com/blog/) or URL.

Below are some actionable ways to use this report.

Find external links to competing pages

It makes sense to link to useful external resources when publishing content. But as time passes, you may end up creating your own resources about those very topics.

This results in you inadvertently linking to competing pages.

To solve this, enter your domain into Site Explorer and go to the Anchors report in the "Outgoing links" section. Search for an anchor related to a post you recently published.

Hit the button in the "External" column to see more details about any external link.

Here, we’re linking to a competing guide about crawl budget. We've since changed this link to point to our own guide.

Find nofollowed internal links

Add a “Nofollow” filter. Sort the report by the number of internal links from high to low.

Where relevant, remove the nofollow attribute on the link.

Keep learning

Check out our guides on the Ahrefs blog:

• Anchor Text: A Data‐Driven Guide (384,614 Web Pages Studied)
• Internal Links for SEO: An Actionable Guide
• A Simple SEO Strategy (The ‘Middleman’ Method)