Introduction to Site Explorer

Introduction to Site Explorer

Site Explorer is our competitive research tool that helps you reverse engineer your competitor’s organic rankings, backlink profiles, paid traffic performance – you name it.

This is possible thanks to our 662 million keywords search index and 35 trillion backlink database that power Site Explorer.

To put this data to good use, it’s important to understand how search works.

How to conduct effective searches

There are three parts to running a search in Site Explorer.

1. Protocol

You can choose between HTTP, HTTPS text, or HTTP + HTTPS. We recommend to almost always set it to HTTP + HTTPS.

NOTE
The only time you might do a single protocol search is if you’re looking for something very specific at an exact URL. Or when searching for pages that weren’t properly migrated from HTTP to HTTPS.

2. URL

Here you can enter a domain, subdomain, subfolder, or exact URL.

3. Search mode

Determines the scope of your search based on the URL entered and will affect most metrics and reports you will see. There are four options to choose from:

For example, if we search for ahrefs.com, the scope of the project will include data from the entire root domain and also all subdomains like: “www.ahrefs.com”, “help.ahrefs.com”, “docs.ahrefs.com”, and so on.

For example, we may want to search for “ahrefs.com” and exclude data from its subdomains (like “help.ahrefs.com”). Or perhaps analyze just a part of a website that lives on a subdomain like the one from above.

For example, searching for “ahrefs.com/blog/” would only show us data for pages that are housed under the /blog/ subfolder.

An example of this would be if you want to search for a website’s homepage URL, or a specific blog post or landing page.

NOTE
Pay attention whether your target uses the “www” in their URL.

For example, if we search for hubspot.com and set the mode to Exact URL mode, Site Explorer shows that their homepage ranks for 0 keywords and gets 0 search visits. This is not true, since Hubspot’s own page actually lives on a “www” subdomain. If we add it, we’re going to see metrics for its organic traffic performance.

NEXT
Overview
5:11

Module 1. Ahrefs’ Crawler and Index 15 min

Module 2. Ahrefs SEO metrics 22 min

Module 3. Exploring your Ahrefs account 10 min

Module 4. Dashboard 2 min

Module 5. Site Explorer 44 min

1 Introduction to Site Explorer

2
Overview
5:11
3
Page Inspect
1:01
4
Site Structure
2:07
5
Calendar
1:58
6
Backlinks
3:31
7
Broken backlinks
1:04
8
Referring domains
1:47
9
Anchors
1:50
10
Internal backlinks
1:41
11
Organic keywords
2:24
12
Organic competitors
3:00
13
Top pages
14
Paid keywords
1:33
15
Ads
2:05
16
Paid pages
1:53
17
Best by links
1:44
18
Linked domains
2:48
19
Outgoing anchors
2:42
20
Outgoing links
2:45

Module 6. Keywords Explorer 30 min

Module 7. Site Audit 30 min

Module 8. Rank Tracker 12 min

Module 9. Content Explorer 12 min

Module 10. Competitive Analysis 5 min

Module 11. Alerts 7 min

Module 12. Toolbar 4 min

About this course How to Use Ahrefs

62 lessons

3h 18m

What you’ll learn

Course by

Andrei Țiț
Andrei Țiț is a product marketer at Ahrefs. He develops content to help you make the most out of Ahrefs.

Sam Oh
Sam Oh is VP of Marketing at Ahrefs. He incorporates his commitment to education and love for entrepreneurship into actionable and easy-to-digest tutorials.

Certification Exam

67 questions

Take the course exam to test what you’ve learned. Pass it and you’ll get a personal certificate signed by our educators and Ahrefs.

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