Here’s how many people decide which “backlink checker” tool to sign up for:

• They take a few domain names;
• Put them into different “backlink checkers”;
• See which one reports more backlinks;
• Sign up for it.

The more backlinks – the better, right?

But here’s what happens next…

They export all these hundreds of thousands of backlinks that they were promised into a CSV file.

Open this file in Excel and start sifting through the backlinks:

www.problogger.net/archives/2013/11/26/5-fundamentals-that-determine-how-fast-your-blog-grows/
(ok, that looks like a good backlink from a blog post)

www.problogger.net/search/how+to+find+content+for+my+blog/page/19/
(the same blog post, being noticed by crawler on page #19 of internal search results for “how to find content for my blog”)

www.problogger.net/search/how+to+find+content+for+my+blog/page/20/
(oh.. now it was noticed on page #20 too)

www.problogger.net/search/Writing+courses/page/4/
(…and on page #4 for “writing courses”)

www.problogger.net/search/start+blog/page/32/
(…and on page #32 for “start a blog”)

www.problogger.net/search/google+analytics+wordpress/page/3/
(…you’re kidding me, right?)

www.problogger.net/page/6/?s=freelance
(OMG.. now some parameters in the URL?)

www.problogger.net/page/15/?s=wordpress+plugins
(…seriously?)

…and some of these backlinks are not even live actually, because a single article can’t be on page #19 and page #20 at the same time.

This is where you go:

Here at Ahrefs we call these links “garbage links“.

It is very common for a backlink to get duplicated numerous times because the internal structure of the website allows it to do so.

Obviously these duplicates don’t carry any additional weight for search engines.

And even though we invest tons of resources to make sure we only give you legitimate “live” links, still many of them are nothing but silly duplicates of a single good link.

“Group Similar Links” – The Backlink Filter That You Were Waiting For

All these pages in my example above are the actual backlinks that Ahrefs has discovered for my personal blog – bloggerjet.com.

There were 30 of these duplicates actually. All created by a single guest post I wrote for Problogger.

And I bet you’ve been there too. Many times.

Dig into the backlink profile of any website and you’ll find tons of “garbage links” there.

This is why I’m so excited that we finally found a way to weed them out:

To save your sanity this filter is now enabled by default across all backlink reports.

And whenever we discover that a certain backlink got duplicated, we’ll create a “group” for it, that you can easily expand if needed:

This should make your backlink reports so much cleaner and save you tons of your precious time.

This is especially the case for the “NEW/LOST Backlinks” report.

Whenever a “duplicate link” was wandering from page #3 to page #4 – we were reporting one “new” link and one “lost” link to you.

Which was pretty irritating, right? (you were seeing the same links in your New/Lost reports over and over again)

Well, from now on this new filter will take care of this issue, so that your New/Lost Backlinks report will make much more sense.

And that’s it I guess.

I sincerely hope that you’re going to enjoy this new backlink filter as much as I do.

And make sure to check back next Monday for more awesome Ahrefs’ features!