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What are Live, Recent and Historical links?
What are Live, Recent and Historical links?

Find out what are Live, Recent and Historical links and the difference between them. For Site Explorer Legacy reports only

May avatar
Written by May
Updated over a week ago

The following information refers to features in Site Explorer > Legacy reports only. These reports can be found at the bottom of the Site Explorer sidebar.


Live Links
This index contains "live" backlinks only. A backlink is considered "live" until we re-crawl the linking page and see otherwise (which usually takes us anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks).

Recent Links
This index consists of all "live" backlinks plus "lost" backlinks that had "live" status during the last 3-4 months. The link is considered "lost" when we don’t find it on the referring page while re-crawling it, or the referring page itself is not available for some reason.

Historical Links
This index is a record of all backlinks that were seen by Ahrefs crawlers as "live", but not necessary live today. We started recording data to this index in May 2016.

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