When you open the “Backlinks” report in the Site Explorer tool, you might notice that we have a default filter for it, called “Group similar links”:
Where to find this filter
You'll be able to find this filter in Backlinks, Broken backlinks, Outgoing links, and Internal links reports in Site Explorer.
Why use this filter, and how it works
This filter vastly improves the quality of data in this report, because it helps filter out what we call “garbage links”.
Here's an example of what we mean:
Whenever some website links to you, that single link might get duplicated multiple times because of the structure of the linking website.
For example, if you get a link from a blog post: problogger.net/archives/2013/11/26/5-fundamentals-that-determine-how-fast-your-blog-grows/
It will then appear in this blog’s internal search results, for some relevant keywords:
It will also appear in the “archives” of this blog, as the article you got link from gets pushed down further and further by newly published articles:
But all of these “linking pages” represent exactly the same link, which we can easily identify and group with the “Group similar links” feature.
This was just one of the examples of how a single link can get duplicated across many pages of a website.
You can expand the group and see what these links are by clicking the dropdown with the number on the right:
