SEARCHENGINES
Backlink Gaps: Quick Guide

Have you ever heard of backlink gap analysis? If you do SEO, you probably know what we’re talking about, but if you don’t know then read on to find out. In this short guide, we’ll show you what backlink gap analysis is, why you should integrate this practice into your everyday SEO tasks, and how you can use SERPed.net to get the most out of this data. Let’s dive in.
What is Backlink Gaps Analysis?
To understand backlink gap analysis, we first need to understand what backlinks are.
Backlinks are links that point to your website (homepage or inner page) from external sources. Unlike internal links, which you can set up inside your website architecture by yourself, external links are usually organic – i.e., they result from a positive action taken by someone else outside your website.
Since backlinks are considered by Google’s algorithm as upvotes for your website, the more backlinks you have, the better. However, it’s not just about quantity; the quality of these links also matters. You want your backlinks to come from websites with a low spam score and a high authority in their field.
Therefore, since backlinks are necessary for your website to rank higher, you need to have a backlink strategy that includes tactics on how to make sure your website gets external links that matter.
Backlink gap analysis is a part of competitive analysis in SEO and is something that has developed as a result of the ever-increasing sophistication in SEO tactics. Essentially, a backlink gap tool will analyze your competitors’ external link profiles in order to identify backlink gaps, that is, backlinks that are present in your competitors’ external profiles which are not present in yours. A backlink gap tool will provide you with a list of websites that link to your competitors, but not to you (yet).
But how does this benefit you? We’ll answer this question in the next section.
Why You Should Use Backlink Gaps Analysis
So why should you do backlink gaps analysis? It’s not as complicated as it seems. Basically, if you find two of your competitors (or more) have links from a website and you don’t, getting that link is probably easy to do. If you run out of ideas when it comes to link building, this is something you should definitely try.
When performing backlink gaps analysis, you’ll find links that can help you with your SEO strategy. Some links may come from websites that are not as relevant for your website, but by reviewing these links carefully, you should be able to determine the links you should get and the ones you should ignore.
Thus, in order to benefit from this practice, you need to spend some time analyzing these links. SERPed.net makes it easier to strike gold, by giving you metrics that help you understand if that link will improve your website SEO or make it harder for you to rank.
Once you have your list of websites that you’d like to get a link from, you would probably have to get in touch with the webmasters. It is very important to plan your approach. We recommend sending an email to get the ball rolling.
Of course, your email needs to get the attention of your target recipient. Sometimes, you’ll hit a wall either because you don’t get a reply from your recipient, or because your email doesn’t get to the right person.
Tips For Outreach Emails
There are a few things you can do in your outreach email (the message you send to the webmasters) in order to increase your chances of getting that link. We’ll go through a few tips that might help.
First of all, make sure you know your target recipient. If you get a few details about your recipient’s interests, you can use them to create common ground between you two and enhance your chances of success.
Don’t use a template to copy and paste your email. Different people require different approaches.
Offer something in return. Your recipient will always think “what’s in it for me?” and you need to make it clear what they’re getting from you. Ideally, you should be able to get their cooperation without having to pay for the link, as paid links can damage your reputation online.
As a final note about outreach: get straight to the point. Don’t waste your recipient’s time. Be short and concise. If your email is over 200 words, you need to cut it down!
And now that you have a few tips about how to contact webmasters for backlinks, we’ll explain how you can use SERPed.net to analyze your backlink gaps.
Backlink Gaps on SERPed.net
To carry out a backlink gap analysis, use the Backlinks Explorer tool. You can find it on the Tools menu, under SEO Analysis.
Once you open the Backlinks Explorer tool, click on the blue “+” button to create a new analysis.
To explore competitor backlinks, click on the “Start” button under “Backlink Gaps”.
Fill in all the fields. At the top, add your website URL; on the bottom fields, add three competitors that specialize in the same product or service that you sell.
Now, once you’re done, click on “Find Backlink Opportunities” to run the analysis. As you can see, this search will cost you 4 credits – one for each website analyzed. And here are the results:
In this screen, you’ll see the number of matches (number of websites out of the total four that have backlinks from that specific domain). Under each website you analyzed, you’ll see another number: this is the number of backlinks that each website has from the domain on the left.
To find out the exact link, hover on the number and a “+” sign will appear. Click the “+” sign and you’ll see the exact URL for those backlinks.
We always recommend “100 links from 100 domains” rather than “100 links from one domain”. Variety is also key in backlink strategies.
When it comes to matches, you can order the results to start with the domains that link to one of your competitors only. At the right of “Matches”, you’ll find a tiny arrow. Click on it to re-order match numbers.
You can click one each website URL to visit the websites and determine whether that’s a link you should have as well or not and how hard it would be to get this link.
Wrapping Up
Using backlink gap analysis, you can improve your rankings by getting a list of highly authoritative links that your competitors already have but you do not.
Competitive analysis is part of SEO, and using SERPed.net you can make sure your off-page SEO is on point. On-page SEO is also important, and the best approach you can take when doing SEO is to think about each task as part of a whole.
SEO is a lot of work, but a boost in your ranking on Google SERPs (search engine result pages) will help you get more visitors to your website, and, therefore, more sales.
However, you must remember that SEO does not bring results overnight. Patience (and a bit of stubbornness) is the best trait you can have when doing SEO work.
What are your thoughts? Did we forget something? You can send suggestions or questions our way using the comment box. If you prefer to reach out on social media, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Source: Vanessa Marcos
SEARCHENGINES
Google Core Update Done Followed By Intense Search Volatility, New Structured Data, Google Ads Head Steps Down & 20 Years Covering Search

Google’s November 2023 core update finally finished rolling out this week, and it was the longest core update rollout. Then, a day later, we saw more intense Google search ranking volatility and chatter. Google added new organization structured data and also added a new profile page and discussion forum structured data, both with Search Console and Rich Results test support. Google’s crawl rate setting is going away soon. Google Search Console went down a couple of times this week. Google spoke about the SEO value of bringing back 404 pages for links. Did you see the Google patent for what appears to be SGE? Microsoft is working to bring GPT-4 Turbo to Copilot and Bing Chat. Google Ads won’t allow personalized ads for consumer finance topics in February 2024. Google Local Service Ads has new impression metrics. Google Ads released its Ads API schedule for 2024. Google is testing Gray accepted labels in the search results. Google is testing line separators between sitelinks. Google is testing an interview label for news results. Google local photos is testing hearts and other emotion reactions. Google is testing removing the cache link from the search result listings. Google’s head of search ads, Jerry Dischler, is stepping down after 15 years. And I’ve been covering the search industry and search for 20 years now. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
Sponsored by BruceClay, who has been doing search marketing optimization since 1996 and also has an amazing SEO training platform.
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Search Topics of Discussion:
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SEARCHENGINES
Generative Summaries For Search Results

Google has a published patent named “Generative summaries for search results” which is believed to be the patent behind the Search Generative Experience launch we saw earlier this year. This patent was filed on March 20, 2023 and approved on September 26, 2023 under the patent ID US11769017B1.
Juan Gonzalez Villa posted a thread on X breaking it down, which I will embed below so you can read it.
The abstract reads:
At least selectively utilizing a large language model (LLM) in generating a natural language (NL) based summary to be rendered in response to a query. In some implementations, in generating the NL based summary additional content is processed using the LLM. The additional content is in addition to query content of the query itself and, in generating the NL based summary, can be processed using the LLM and along with the query content—or even independent of the query content. Processing the additional content can, for example, mitigate occurrences of the NL based summary including inaccuracies and/or can mitigate occurrences of the NL based summary being over-specified and/or under-specified.
Here are Juan’s posts:
Before we start: there are currently no other patents assigned to Google mentioning generative AI techniques and search.
There might be other patents on the same topic still pending, but I believe this document is highly relevant to Google SGE as it works right now. pic.twitter.com/L4Ly5Ows2c
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
1. Receiving a query associated with a client device. The query can be explicitly entered by a user or automatically generated based on context.
2. Selecting a set of search result documents (SRDs) that are responsive to the query and related or recent queries.
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
4. Processing the SRD content snippets using an LLM to generate LLM output. An optional summarization prompt can also be included.
5. Generating a natural language summary using the LLM output. This leverages robustness of the LLM while constraining it to the SRD content.
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
This checks out with something stated in the document “An Overview of SGE”, made public by Google around SGE’s launch, although we didn’t have any more details.
The patent now provides plenty of detail around how and why several models are available and can be used: pic.twitter.com/U035N35Bxl
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
3. The selection can be based on:
• Processing the query with a classifier to predict best model(s)
• Detecting certain terms in the query to indicate suitable model(s)
• Considering search result types/content to determine appropriate model(s)— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
So by dynamically selecting from multiple candidate generative models, the invention aims to optimize accuracy and efficiency by choosing the most suited model(s) for any given query.
The patent also provide some details on how the links to sources work:
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
1. “A portion, of a visually rendered NL summary, that is supported by a first SRD can be selectable (and optionally underlined, highlighted, and/or otherwise annotated).
A selection of the portion can result in navigating to a link corresponding to the first SRD.”
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
3. The links can be general links to the SRDs or specific anchor links to the portions that provide the verification.
4. The linkified portions can be determined based on comparing the summary content to SRD content using encoder models to identify verified portions. pic.twitter.com/zlJFFO2c6Q
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
Here’s how confidence works, according to the patent:
1. Confidence measures can be generated for portions of the summary or for the summary as a whole.
The confidence measures are then used to determine which confidence annotation from a set of candidates should be applied.
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
3. A textual “high confidence”, “medium confidence”, or “low confidence” annotation can be annotated for the NL based summary as a whole.
Each of the portions of the NL based summary can be annotated with a corresponding color that reflects a degree of confidence in that portion
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
Thanks for reading so far.
Here’s the link to the patent: https://t.co/AtGMiWqzG9
Now, I’ll explain how I found out about this patent, and another interesting thing:
What Google SGE and Featured Snippets have in common… 🤓⤵
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
According to his own career summary, he worked in SGE at Google between Nov 2022 and Sep 2023. He is now a Google Fellow, the highest rung on the ladder for Google engineers, which they reach thanks to “consistently outstanding accomplishments”. pic.twitter.com/aZmpfkajmI
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
Their careers afterwards were very similar: they both went to Apple, where they worked in Search and Siri, and came back to Google at the end of 2022 to work in SGE.
So… how did I find the patent? I decided to look for patents by any of these two engineers and there it was. 💡 pic.twitter.com/1uUPi9myoj
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
Their careers afterwards were very similar: they both went to Apple, where they worked in Search and Siri, and came back to Google at the end of 2022 to work in SGE.
So… how did I find the patent? I decided to look for patents by any of these two engineers and there it was. 💡 pic.twitter.com/1uUPi9myoj
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
If you enjoyed this thread, any feedback, likes and/or RTs are appreciated.
Also, here’s a post version of this thread:https://t.co/JSt9qNcVTr
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 29, 2023
Nice write up Juan!
Forum discussion at X.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Ranking Algorithm Volatility Today

I am seeing some signs of some big Google Search ranking volatility and shuffling today. The November core update just finished, so Google would say it is not the core update but the November reviews update is still rolling out. Or maybe this new ranking volatility is unrelated to any confirmed update – I don’t know.
Many of the tracking tools spike this morning, which means they are seeing some big ranking volatility this morning. I am also seeing some increased chatter within the SEO community but it is early, so it is limited.
Let’s start with the tools today.
Google Search Volatility Tracking Tools
Cognitive SEO (seems stalled):
Mozcast (normally updates later today):
So most of the tools are showing big changes in the Google Search results.
SEO Chatter
Here is the chatter I am seeing within the SEO community from this site and WebmasterWorld:
Very slow today…
Some wild Ride traffic-wise started the last hours.
I am getting bursts of traffic for a short period of time that makes the gained
traffic while the core update is running return again.
Appears like a fight of Google core algorithm and other ongoing algorithms is going on
and from time to time, some algorithm fires and activates and takes over
and returns the traffic, while other times, another algorithm takes control and smashes the traffic back to low and renders the Google core algorithm useless.
It’s heavy volatile.
and just as the update finished, the results are shuffled again. It’s so disgusting at this point.
I feel like the “December” update has already begun…
Our UK traffic and conversions plummeted within hours of the update finishing.
Yeah we took a big downturn last week, but thought it was Google Manipulation for Black Friday.
But since the update finished, it feels like our sites are offline, especially today.
What are you all seeing?
Is this the end of the reviews update or something new?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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