Search engines like Google use a large set of factors to determine an URL’s search result position. A lot of important factors are based on external ingoing links called backlinks. Each backlink a search engine crawls will be taken into consideration to rank URLs in different search result pages (short SERPs).

Therefore to be able to find out why a website has a specific SERP position, key is to know the backlink profile. That means to see what the search engine sees. Since search engines do not disclose their source data to the public, third party services (so called backlink checkers or backlink monitoring tools) have established to provide you exactly that. The issue is that backlink data of such services differ from the backlink data of search engines. A minor difference is caused by a different crawling infrastructure and filter mechanisms. A major difference is caused by hidden backlinks. Major because hidden backlinks are often hidden with a specific intention and not because they do not hold any SEO value.

A common case are website owners which use a set of websites they own (Private Blog Network) to link out to their profit generating website. To mask this pattern from competition they hide these particular backlinks from third party crawlers but not from search engine crawlers. The resulting effect is that search engines still take those backlinks into consideration but SEOs are not able to spot them since third party services they use cannot expose them. Here Linxact comes into play. We offer you exactly this missing piece of information you need to evaluate a backlink profile like a search engine does.