Please correct me if I’m being wrong here:

Even the most accurate list of your competitor’s backlinks doesn’t make much sense unless you’re able to filter and categorize it somehow.

I mean once you’ve downloaded a CSV file with 10k backlinks, what are you going to do next?

Open each page and check it manually?

Of course not!

• You’re going to sort these backlinks by DR (Domain Rating) and UR (URL Rating) to see the most powerful sites and pages that link to your competitor;
• You may filter them by anchor text, to identify where keyword rich links come from;
• You might also want to research “dofollow” links only (because these are the ones that pass linkjuice);
• And a few weeks ago we’ve added an option to filter backlinks by “platform”: blog, forum, cms, wordpress, etc. – these help you to quickly identify the linkbuilding strategies that your competitors are using.

See, where I’m going with this?

Here at Ahrefs we focus a lot on bringing you the most complete and fresh backlink data on any website in the world.

But we also put a lot of effort in helping you “read” that data.

Filter Backlinks By Language

Did you notice a brand new filter called “Language” in Ahrefs Site Explorer?

It looks like this:

I guess it’s pretty self explanatory, right?

We can now identify the language of the linking page and thus we’re giving you an option to filter your backlinks by language.

But how helpful is that?

• If your site is in English and you see a lot of backlinks coming from Chinese and Japanese pages, it can be that the SEO agency you’ve hired didn’t do a very great job building links for you (and you actually might want to disavow those);
• You may also discover that your competitors are regularly featured in Germany, which might make you want to reach out to German publications and introduce yourself.

These two use cases are just from the top of my head.

I’m sure that once you play with this new filter just a bit, you will come up with many more ideas of how it can be useful to you.

(feel free to share them with me by the way)