How to analyze external domains in your website code

External links can be both a plus and a minus for optimizing your website. If you link to other domains on your website, this is a signal to search engines that you trust these external resources. Therefore, locate on your website only up-to-date, trusted links to sites with high authority. Analyzing external domains en masse will be easier than looking at each link separately. Therefore, we suggest that you consider a faster option for analyzing external links: first analyze the domains. Remove links to irrelevant external domains from the website, and then work with links to the high authority domains.

How to find all external domains on your website

Step 1. Start a new crawl or select the one you want to analyze from the list.

Step 2. Go to the crawl results report – dashboard “External links”. Here you can find information about all external domains on your website.

Nota bene! If the crawl was partial, the results will show only those domains that were found on the scanned pages. With a partial crawl, you will not be able to evaluate the quantity and quality of all external links on your website.

Step 3. Analyze information about top domains. Here you can immediately highlight those that are useful and those that are suspicious.

Nota bene! JetOctopus marked subdomains as external links. That is, all domains that differ from the starting URL in the crawl will be marked as external.

Step 4. For a detailed analysis of external domains and the number of links to each of the domains, go to the data table – “Links Domains”. Here you can choose either “External Domains” or “External Domains dofollow”. The first data table includes all external domains, the other only domains with the dofollow attribute (or without the nofollow, sponsored and ban attributes).

Analysis of the list of external domains

What is interesting in the external domains dataset:

• a complete list of external domains found during crawling;
• the number of links to each domain found during crawling; by clicking on a number, you will go to a table with a complete list of links to this domain;
• the “Links Sample” column shows the first 10 links for the example.

You can filter domains by URL (1); add the source page of the URL, that is, filter the pages in the code of which external links were found; or add a condition for “Link destination (absolute URL)” – an exact external link.

The first filtering can be used to separate domains by country or domain zone (.com, .gov, .en, etc.).

The second filter is great for understanding which types of pages on your website have external links. Highlight product pages to see if product descriptions contain links to external sites.

The third filter is a cool way to detect links to a specific type of URL, for example, PDF files, Google Docs, social media bots, etc. After all, all these links will have the same part of the URL for each domain.

In order to export a list of all external domains, click on the “Export” button and choose the most convenient format for you: CSV, Excel, Google Sheets or Data Studio.