Deze handleiding is beschikbaar in het Engels.
Backlinks & link gap
See every site linking to your domain, track new and lost backlinks, and find sites that link to your competitors but not to you.
The Backlinks module shows who links to your website: referring domains, individual backlinks, their anchors, dofollow or nofollow status and the strength of each linking site. The Link gap tab goes one step further and lists sites that link to your competitors but not to you, which makes it a ready-made outreach list.
It is useful for site owners checking their link profile, SEO teams monitoring new and lost links, and anyone building links who wants to know where to look next. Open it from the sidebar under Project → Backlinks (open it).
How it works
serp.ac collects the live backlinks of your project's domain and stores them for the project. The data is refreshed automatically every 14 days, and you can click Refresh now at any time to fetch it right away. The date of the data is shown next to the button (Updated …).
- Domain totals: the cards at the top show the total number of backlinks and referring domains known for your domain, plus your Domain rank on a 0–100 scale.
- Tracked backlinks: the individual links in the tables come from the strongest referring domains first. If your domain has more backlinks than your plan tracks, a note explains that the tables cover the strongest ones while the totals still cover all of them.
- New: a backlink counts as new when it was first seen in the last 30 days.
- Lost: a backlink is marked lost when a full refresh no longer finds it. To avoid false alarms, lost links are only marked when the complete list could be fetched, and never when a refresh suddenly returns nothing.
- Purchased: backlinks that match a link you track in Link management get a Purchased badge, so you can tell bought links from natural ones at a glance.
Link gap
For the gap analysis serp.ac compares the referring domains of every competitor you list in the project's Competitor domains setting with your own. Any site that links to at least one competitor but not to you is a link opportunity. Your own domain and your competitors' domains are never listed as opportunities.
Step by step
- Open Project → Backlinks. The first view is Referring domains, sorted by domain rank.
- If the list is empty or old, click Refresh now and wait a moment for the data to load.
- Use the filters All, New (30 days), Lost and Dofollow to narrow the list. The count on each filter shows how many links match.
- Click a referring domain (or its backlink count) to see every link from that site. Switch to All backlinks to see the source page, Anchor, Target page, rel and First seen date of each link.
- To find link gaps, add your competitors first: open Project → Project settings (shortcut) and enter their domains in Competitor domains, separated by commas.
- Go back to Backlinks and open the Link gap tab. Start with the domains that link to two or more competitors.
- Click Export CSV to download the full gap list for your outreach spreadsheet.
What the numbers mean
| Metric | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Backlinks | Total links pointing to your domain | The subline shows the dofollow share of the links serp.ac tracks. |
| Referring domains | Unique websites linking to you | The subline shows your domain rank, e.g. "Domain rank 43/100". |
| New (30 days) | Links first seen in the last 30 days | Based on serp.ac's own tracking since you added the project. |
| Lost | Links that disappeared | Shown faded in the backlinks table with a Lost badge. |
| DR | The linking site's own domain rank, 0–100 | A PageRank-style score based on the number and quality of sites linking to it, on a logarithmic scale. |
On the Link gap tab:
- Link opportunities: all sites that link to a competitor, not to you.
- Link to 2+ competitors: the subset that links to at least two of your competitors. These are the most likely to link to you too. (With a single competitor this card is called Strong opportunities.)
- Competitors compared: the domains used in the analysis.
- In the table, Links to highlights which competitors each site links to, and Competitors shows the count, for example 2/3. The list is sorted by that count, then by DR.
The on-screen table shows the top 500 opportunities; the CSV contains all of them, with one yes/no column per competitor. The file uses semicolons and opens directly in Excel.
Tips
- Pick three to five real search competitors (sites that rank for your keywords), not the biggest brands in your industry. The gap list will be much more relevant.
- Sort your outreach by the Competitors count first. A site that links to three of your competitors is clearly open to linking to sites like yours.
- Check Lost after each refresh. Losing a strong dofollow link from a high-DR domain is often worth an email to the site owner.
- Links you paid for belong in Link management, where they are checked every day. The Purchased badge here then confirms that the link is also visible in the backlink index.
- If a competitor shows an error on the gap tab, its data couldn't be loaded this time. The rest of the analysis is still valid; try again later.
FAQ
How often is backlink data updated?
Automatically every 14 days. Click Refresh now for fresh data at any time; you can do this a few times per hour per project. Team members with view-only access can see the data but can't refresh it.
Why are the totals higher than the number of links in the table?
The totals cover every backlink known for your domain. The tables list the individual links from the strongest referring domains, up to your plan's limit. When that limit is reached, a note under the cards tells you how many links are tracked out of the total.
Why was a backlink marked lost when it still exists?
A link is marked lost when a complete refresh doesn't find it anymore, for example because the page changed or the link moved to a different URL. If it reappears in a later refresh, it is shown as live again. For links you depend on, use Link management, which checks the actual page every day.
Why is the Link gap tab empty?
Either no competitors are set for the project (add them under Competitor domains in Project settings), or every site linking to your competitors already links to you.
Where else can I see my backlink numbers?
The project overview shows your live backlinks, new links and lost links. Backlink figures are also part of project reports, and AI assistants connected through the MCP server can read a backlink summary of your project.