
People Still Ask Me: If Ahrefs Doesn’t See a Backlink, Does That Mean Google Ignores It?
If I’m not mistaken, I’ve already written a post about this topic before. But I want to refresh everyone’s memory. Ahrefs is not Google. It has no direct connection to Google rankings, Google Search, its algorithms, and so on. All it does is collect publicly available information about backlink profiles, semantics, and keywords, organize it, and present it through attractive reports, charts, and tables.
Ahrefs is a third-party service with its own backlink discovery logic. The principles behind why it finds one link but misses another are known only to its developers — and probably not even all of them )) Based on my observations, Ahrefs finds anywhere from 30% to 70–80% of a website’s backlinks. The price of a link doesn’t always matter either. I regularly buy the same $500 media backlink for different projects, yet Ahrefs simply doesn’t see the domain. Maybe it’s blocked from crawlers, or maybe it isn’t. However, everything appears in GSC without any issues.
It’s better to check:
1) Whether the page containing the backlink is indexed by Google — you can easily check this manually or through any suitable service.
2) The “Top linking sites” report in Google Search Console.
If the link is present in both places, everything is fine. These two checks are enough. You need to know how to use Ahrefs properly and interpret the information it provides. Basically, don’t blindly trust it. It’s an incredibly useful tool and one of the best available — I spend entire days using it myself. But you shouldn’t blindly trust it or assume that success in Ahrefs automatically equals success in Google )
Hugs to everyone 🫂
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