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External Links (Follow) Data

External Links (Follow)

External Links (Follow)
Values Returned
What We Do
Examples of how Linking Data Can Be Used
- Example 1: Identify Pages with a Lot of Follow External Links
- Example 2: Identify Sitewide Follow External Links
- Example 3: Reduce Leaked Authority
Related Content
Benefits of Our Data

 

External Links (Follow)

The number of ‘follow’ links pointing to another domain, for each URL.

 

Values Returned

Within the column for ‘external links (follow)’, there is only one type of value returned for this which is as follows:

Number

A number between 0 and infinity

 

What We Do

This number is the total amount of follow links pointing to a domain other than the primary domain or its sub-domains, regardless if any of the following is true or not:

  • Return a status code other than 200
  • If the link is redirected to another URL

 

Examples of how Linking Data Can Be Used

The examples below show how this data can be used for SEO.

 

Example 1: Identify Pages with a Lot of Follow External Links

Follow external links leak authority to other domains, they also dilute the authority that passes through the internal links on the same page. As such this metric can be a great way to see problem pages.

 

Example 2: Identify Sitewide Follow External Links

In some cases, there are the same group of follow external links appearing on every page of the site. This can be things like social media profile links. Identifying this is the first step in resolving the issue by adding the ‘nofollow’ attribute to the link code.

 

Example 3: Reduce Leaked Authority

By reducing the overall number of follow external links on your site, you can preserve authority, and this has a direct impact on a site’s organic visibility.

 

Related Content

The list of guides below might be useful if you are analysing this data and want to know more about it:

Related column headers in Raptor website crawler reports:

 

Benefits of Our Data

There are several benefits to analysing follow external link data, such as those listed below:

  • Identify external linking Issues for SEO
  • Identify all follow external links
  • Resolve authority leaks
  • Audit a site’s follow external links profile
  • Scrape competitor follow external links

 

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