When viewing the legacy backlinks report in Site Explorer, you will notice that you can filter by "Link Type":
What do these link types mean?
Here's a quick breakdown:
Dofollow - By default, all links are dofollow links unless modified to become nofollow. Dofollow links are commonly considered to pass "weight" and help a target website or URL to rank better in organic search results. This filter shows all the links that are dofollow.
Redirect - A redirect is a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested/want to visit. This filter shows all the links that have been redirected.
Governmental - Governmental links are links from .gov sites. This filter shows all the .gov links.
Educational - Educational links are links from .edu sites. This filter shows all the .edu links.
Nofollow - A nofollow link is a link with the attribute rel="nofollow". This tells search engines to not crawl them or count them as votes of quality. This filter shows all the links that are nofollow.
UGS - User Generated Content link is a link with the attribute rel= "ugc". This attribute value is recommended for links within user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
Sponsored - A sponsored link is a link with the attribute rel="sponsored". This filter shows all links that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships, or other compensation agreements.
Content - An in-content link (or editorial link) is a link within the body of a piece of content. This filter shows all the links within pieces of content.
With redirect chain - A redirect chain occurs when there are more than one redirect between the initial URL and the destination URL. For example, someone.com redirects to bit.ly, which redirects to yoursite.com. This filter shows all the links with redirect chains.
Without redirect chain - This filter shows all the links without the above stated redirect chains.
So, if I wanted to see all the .gov links linking to my site, I could filter by "Governmental" links, and I'll see all the .gov links:
In the Backlinks report 2.0 you can use the advanced filter for checking results with the .gov or .edu links:
You can also check several requests simultaneously, for this, you need to click on “+ rule” in the filter:
UGS, Sponsored, and Nofollow links can be checked with the following filter:
With the "Backlink type" filter, you can check:
regular links - standard <a href> hyperlinks;
backlinks in content - links that are found in the biggest piece of content on the page;
regular links that have an image inside their anchor;
links pointing to your target via a redirect;
canonical links;
links that are found in <iframe src=""> HTML tags.
After setting all necessary filters you need to click the "Show results" button to get the info with the chosen filters applied:
We also have a detailed tutorial for this report:
Please, contact our support team for more details via chat or drop us an email at [email protected].