Use cases

Here are some actionable use cases for Web Explorer.

Find pages that contain certain keywords in the anchor text of their outgoing links

A great way to build links is to search for pages that link to topics you’ve already covered, then reach out to the site owners to include your website as an outlink.

For example, we’ve already written an article about how to perform a content audit that includes a template.

To find potential link prospects on this topic, let’s use the search operator outgoinglinkanchor: [content template audit].

This will show us pages whose outgoing link’s anchor text contains our desired keyword.

To further refine prospects, add the following filters:

This will only show us pages coming from high-authority websites, written in English, that are at least one click away from the referring homepage.

Find unlinked brand mentions

Unlinked brand mentions are a low hanging fruit: those mentioning you already talk about you, they just need a friendly nudge to link back to you.

Let’s take our brand as an example. To find such opportunities, we’ll type in “Ahrefs” and exclude (1) pages that already link to ahrefs.com by appending the search with -outlinkdomain:ahrefs.com and (2) pages from ahrefs.com through the search operator -site:ahrefs.com.

To narrow in on meaningful results, click on the Settings dropdown and select One page per domainalong with the other settings.

What’s left is to reach out to them and ask for the link.

Find resource pages in your niche

Resource pages are one of the most popular link building methods.

Let’s say we want to find resource pages in the marketing niche.

For this, we’ll build a search query that finds pages that have “marketing” in their titles and either “resources” or “links” in both their titles and URLs.

So we’ll start the search with intitle: marketing. And use the intitle: and inurl: search operators. But since “resources” or “links” need to both show up in the search results, we’ll group them using brackets and “OR” as follows:

To narrow the list down, search for websites with a DR of at least 35 that links to at least 5 external links.

You’re now down to a more manageable list of prospects that you can reach out to.