Ultimate Guide to The New Features of Ahrefs

Ahrefs released several updates to their tools several months ago, some of which are freely available and incredibly useful. In this article, you will not only learn about them but also how to apply them in practice.

Updated Organic keywords

What distinguishes it from the old tool version is historical data by months with past dates. You can observe the changes since the beginning of this year: keywords that are bringing in more traffic and changes in rankings.

Next, you can see what keywords the site was ranked for in the past. For example, this is a crypto news website, and if you look back, at the beginning of 2019 it was a news site that was ranked for completely different keywords.

And there is a keyword filter. It identifies new and lost keywords, as well as keywords that have improved or declined in rankings.
For example, using the “new” filter, you can see only new keywords for which the site has begun to rank in the last three months.

Then there is a one-way feature that was not originally planned by the developers, but eventually, it was announced to become a separate button. This button provides the ability to find keyword cannibalization for the site.

Cannibalization is when several pages of a site rank at the top for the same keyword. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is bad, depending on the specific case. If such pages distract attention from the ones you need, then you can rewrite them. But there are cases in which it plays into your hands.

For example, one such case is illustrated in the picture.

And right in the Organic keywords report there is a SERPs history. For any keyword, you can use this drop-down date picker to get an idea of what search results looked like in the past, see which sites were before, and where your site was in comparison to others. It is something like a time machine for a search result.

In addition, there is an abundance of filters that can be used immediately in Ahrefs. For example, here are five filters that you can see in the picture. And there is a cool list of ideas for creating awesome content and getting traffic.

Updated Top Pages 2.0 are the best organic website traffic pages

This report shows the best website pages for organic traffic.

Analyzing competitors, observing significant and important changes on their sites is good for promoting and working on your website. Therefore, it is important to watch its traffic history together with the history of new pages.

Next, similar to organic keywords, we can now compare the current period with a year, month, or several months ago and see how the traffic on the page has changed since that time.

For example, by choosing a range to compare with the beginning of the year and sorting the “Change” column in descending order, we get a list of pages that have started to bring the most traffic to the site since the beginning of the year. For the sites we work with, we can sort in reverse order the pages that worsened their traffic the most.

In the upper right corner, there is a switch that toggles the change column between percentage view, absolute value, and a graph that will show the traffic-to-traffic ratio in bars.

In addition, a filter by page status has been added. Page status is either a new page that Ahrefs has started to see in SERPs that it hadn’t seen before, or a lost page that has disappeared from SERPs, or one that hasn’t changed.

The coolest application is to monitor competitors and see what new articles they have published, new pages that start to grow, rank and appear in search results for keywords. For example, let’s compare January of this year, set the status “New” and see for the Lifehacker website pages that were published only in this half of the year and which have already started to increase traffic.

Link opportunities – Potential internal links

Internal links:
1. Ensure the user movement on your site.
2. Pass the PageRank to the pages.
3. Search engines use anchor texts and text next to them in algorithms “to understand the content on the page”.

The most obvious way to add internal links to a site, taking into account the keyword, is the command site: next comes the site name and the keyword.

This is a manual process, where you can enter only one keyword and you do not know if there is a link to the page you would like to pump up. Therefore, there is the Link opportunities tool.

What Link opportunities do:
Collects 10 best (by traffic) keywords for the pages of your site.
2. Looks for mentions of these keywords on other pages of the site.
3. Shows the possibilities for placing internal links (only if the link is no longer there).

This is what this report looks like.

The same functionality is available for free in Ahrefs and is called Webmaster Tools.

Average Frequency vs Monthly Keywords Frequency

One of the latest updates in Ahrefs is Average Frequency or Monthly Frequency for keywords.

Where does the traffic come from?
It is calculated quite simply – knowing the frequency of the keyword, the frequency of the number of clicks on the search results, then the number of clicks is distributed between the search results from the first to the nth position by the percentage of clicks.
The curve is not constant, and there is a curve for each keyword. The data depends on the data that was collected from different services. Summarizing this data of all keywords, the traffic that the site receives is calculated. All tools calculate the traffic that sites have received to date based on the average frequency, average search demand over 12 months, and subtract the estimated traffic that the site receives.
A lot of keywords are influenced by seasonality, trends, peaks and valleys. Therefore, the Ahrefs team added a value not only for the average frequency but also for the monthly frequency. There is a toggle that allows you to calculate the historical traffic of the site according to the trend graph of that keyword.

This is the picture of studying traffic while considering a trend. There is a special tab that allows you to do this, which is very important and useful for certain sites.

The same toggle is in the Top pages, where the shape of the graph changes completely.

Updated Referring Domains Report

The new report combines three old reports. In the picture you can see the status of links from this domain, it is either live, or a lost link, or it is lost during this period of time.

There have been added many filters for user convenience.

Here is an example of using these filters:

• Only Do-follow backlinks
• DR more than 40
• Traffic of the donor-website bigger than 100
• Links to the target website less than 3
• Only new ones
• For last 6 months
• Only from content

Update of the Backlinks Report

First of all, Ahrefs team updated the speed of report appearance. For example, instead of 6 seconds, blog loads in 2 seconds. For larger sites, this is even more of a difference. The loading of reports has been accelerated by 3-5 times.

There is no longer any division into indices: “Live”, “Recent”, “Historical”. Now the indexes are merged, you can see the indexes of all reports. Instead, the links have a state that can be:
Newly published. This is when a new page was found with a link to a site that analyzes the page.
New. This is when a link was added to an existing page.
New restored. This means that at some point in time the link disappeared for some reason, and then reappeared on the page.

There is also a filter by link type.

Filter by the type of the acceptor content is a very useful thing. There are two options: linking to the html page or to other files and resources. Most of them will be links to an image. If you want to look at links to files and resources that have a different format, then in two clicks you’ve got a Backlist report.

The whole set of filters is also present for the backlinks report. The metric to pay attention to is the number of links to other sites from the page. The following formula applies here: the more pages a page links to, the more PageRank is scattered and the less PageRank goes to each page from which the page links. It means that it is better to get links from pages that link to a small number of other sites, then your site will have more weight and bonus. This filter can be applied directly to the report.

Traffic Data from Google Search Console

In order for you to receive data, you need to confirm ownership of the site through the Google Search Console. Ahrefs will keep this data for longer than 16 months. On one page you can see all traffic graphs for all sites, projects that you run. More updates are planned related to backlinks and traffic.

Ahrefs Toolbar

This extension is not entirely new, just redesigned. There is a list of question that Toolbar can help to find the answer to.

For ex. the results in the USA are ranked from the German blog. Ahrefs Toolbar now has such a function as a search simulator from other countries. It will not replace searching from another country, but it will become a fairly accurate and useful simulation. The issue depends not only on the country, but also on the language of your system. And here is an example of a search simulation for Backlinks for the US but in German on the standard domain Google.com. You can find that the articles of the German blog are ranked in the top.

We described main changes added to Ahrefs tools and reports in several last months. Hope it help you to skyrocket your organic traffic and define SEO possibilities clearly in 2022.

By Natural Links