Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is Powerful… and it’s Free

Ahrefs launched a free SEO tool that offers SEO and site diagnostic data. It’s called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. I took a test drive and of the tools and I have to say I’m very impressed with the usefulness and of the on-page and off-page SEO data.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools Overview

The Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is refreshingly simple to use. The navigation is intuitive with data pretty much exactly where you would expect it to be. Data is seemingly no more than one to two clicks away.

Contributing to the frictionless user experience is the liberal use of tooltips. At every point where you might wonder what something is about, there’s a an unobtrusively gray question mark icon that when clicked supplies the needed explanation.

Even the choice of the light gray color for the tooltip icon shows how well planned the interface is. The icon does not intrude on the workflow, contributing to the frictionless user experience.

Webmaster Tools Dashboard

The dashboard of the tool is appropriately simple. It features a readout of:

• Health Score
• Domain Rating
• Referring domains
• Backlinks
• Organic Traffic
• Organic Keywords
• Disavow links tool

All the sections (except the Organic traffic section) can be clicked through to in-depth reports. Navigating directly to website information is super easy and intuitive.

Disavow Link Tool

The Disavowed Link tool is a management tool that helps create and maintain disavow lists in an organized manner. A users can either upload a spreadsheet or manually add URLs and domains.

The disavow data will be used by Ahrefs to ignore the specified URLs in reports and it can also be exported for upload to Google Search Console.

Clicking through the Health Score icon reveals SEO data related to crawl status, crawling errors and warnings, HTTP status response codes (200, 301, 404 and 500). It’s a general overview of the success of a site crawl.

The 500 status response code is especially important feedback because it can alert you to server or database issues. For example, an improperly configured server will give up and begin serving 500 response codes.

Ahrefs Backlink Tool

The backlink tool offers an overview of the backlinks with the ability to review specific kinds of backlinks.

For example, a publisher can narrow down the selection of links by restricting to one link per domain or all links from each domain.

Ahrefs Backlinks Filter

The tool can selectively restrict the view to the following variables:

• Link type (dofollow, redirected, .gov, etc.)
• Platform (blogs, eCommerce, forums, etc.)
• Language
• Traffic (by date)
• Word or Phrase

Word or Phrase Backlink Filter

The “Word or Phrase”backlink filter is hands down my favorite. You can enter .org into this tool and segregate backlinks by all .org backlinks.

You can enter the word “resources” and discover all the sites linking to you that have that word in the URL.

The Word or Phrase tool will include or exclude whatever word or phrase you enter into it.

That’s a killer feature that is useful in many ways. It’s a powerful way to identify quality or low quality links or to find specific kinds of backlinks in a profile.

Tool Limitations

There are limits to how many URLs are crawled and how long data is retained.

Site Audit
• Monthly crawled URLs – 5,000 per project
• Data retention – 3 months
• JS rendering – yes

Site Explorer
• Backlink index – “Live” only
• Rows per report – 1,000
• Rows per month – 100,000
• Export rows per report – 1,000
• Export rows per month – 10,000

Advanced SE reports:
• Content gap – 10 rows per report
• Link Intersect – 10 rows per report
• Competing pages/domains – 10 rows per report
• Top pages/subdomains/paths – 10 rows per report

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools Verdict

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a killer service. There are so many features packed into this tool there is more to it that I haven’t even covered.

It’s hard to believe that something as useful as this is free. The attention to detail, focus on usefulness and ease of use make this a top SEO auditing tool that every web publisher should be using.

Citations

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools Web Page