{
  "id": 15987547,
  "title": "We audited our own backlinks. Four domains linked to us, and two of them counted",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/22/we-audited-our-own-backlinks-four-domains-linked-to-us-and-two-of",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-10-22T02:00:29.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "e27",
    "slug": "e27",
    "url": "https://e27.co/we-audited-our-own-backlinks-four-domains-linked-to-us-and-two-of-them-counted-20261018/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Our company builds software in Ho Chi Minh City. After over a year of operation, we initially believed that our directory listings were beneficial for our website. On August 15, 2026, I conducted an audit to measure the number of linking domains. The audit revealed that there were four domains linking to our site. However, only two of these domains passed any ranking value. The full audit, which includes details of each domain and its attributes, is published on our company blog. This discovery changed how we allocate our resources for link building. The measurement process involves two steps. The first step is conducting Google Search Console's \"Top linking sites\" report, which shows the domains Google has recorded pointing to our site. The second step involves manually inspecting the page in a browser, locating the anchor tag that points to our domain, and checking the rel attribute. Search Console's report includes nofollow links, which do not necessarily indicate any value to the website. If we overlook this second step, we might mistakenly believe that our listings are effective, leading us to register on more directories. The audit showed that one of the two valuable links was an accident. It was a site our engineers had built for a client, containing a credit link in the footer. This byproduct of delivering work is more valuable than all the directory profiles combined. The pattern we observed is that listings obtained by filling out forms, such as directories, are typically marked with nofollow. However, there are exceptions, such as TechBehemoths and e27 company profiles, which carried no restrictions in our measurements. To ensure the approach remains effective, we will continue to monitor the count of value-passing links in 12 months and publish the results.",
  "summary": "Our company builds software in Ho Chi Minh City. Our website has been live for over a year, and for most of that time we assumed our directory listings were doing something for us. On 15 August 2026 I measured it. Four domains link to our site. Two of them pass any ranking value at […] The post We audited our own backlinks. Four domains linked to us, and two of them counted appeared first on e27 .",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}