New in June: Backend magic, Ahrefs Academy, Link lost reasons, etc

Another month of hard work for Ahrefs team is over. Which means it's time we report our progress to you.

(Just in case you've missed our report for May, click here: What’s new at Ahrefs in May)

So here's what we've been up to in June:

Because Ahrefs is a big data company, a fair share of all development work is happening on the backend. (Which means it might not be as visible to our users as the features that we add to our interface.)

Here's a snapshot of what is being brewed at our server racks right now:

Quite a lot, right? And that is just the part that I was allowed to disclose.

Our focus hasn't changed much since May. Nearly 70% of all our development resources are still being poured into two major tools: new Rank Tracker and new Site Audit.

I posted screenshots of both tools in previous post, so here are 2 more screenshots to tease you further:

Please note that these are the "screenshots" of how these tools were designed by our UI/UX team, and not the screenshots of the actual tools.

Which means that the final release might look somewhat different from what you see on the above images. We might remove some things and add some others.

As for the release date, I'm pretty sure that Rank Tracker will go live before summer ends. And in case of Site Audit, that's a much more ambitious tool, so all I can say is "autumn".

I can't express how much I enjoy jumping on a Skype call with random Ahrefs customers and showing them all sorts of amazing features that they didn't know they have access to.

But unfortunately, this kind of "customer education" doesn't really scale. So there was clearly a need for a comprehensive (and brief) course around Ahrefs tools and data.

Enter Ahrefs Academy (https://ahrefs.com/academy):

We've teamed up with Kathryn Aragon to create 10 short and value-packed video lessons, that take you by the hand and walk you though almost all major features of Ahrefs toolset.

(Each video lesson is accompanied by a detailed article, if you prefer text to video.)

This "introductory course" is just the beginning. I'm already in the process of creating a new one, so watch the announcements!

Most likely this small new feature is how you landed on this very article:

We believe it is utterly important for our customers to be up to date with all the latest developments of the toolset that they are paying for.

Every day Ahrefs team is working on some new things that should make your online marketing work easier and more effective. But what's the point if you will never learn about them?

Hence the need for this "Notifications center" and these "what's new" monthly reports.

We figured that displaying a "facebook-style" notification in your Ahrefs account is much less intrusive than sending you an email or a browser push-notification.

This feature will also let you know of the newly published articles at Ahrefs Blog.

We only publish new articles once a week (at best) so you don't have to worry about tons of notifications flooding your Ahrefs account.

Our Backend Team (yes, with capital letters) is now storing more precise "link lost" reasons. Which is now being reflected in Site Explorer reports.

Generally, there are two groups of "link lost" reasons.

Those, related to a linking page:

And those, related to the actual link:

Please keep in mind that these reasons are "reversible" and often caused by webmaster making temporal changes on their website. So it is a common case for a "lost" backlink to go "live" pretty much the next day.

The only exception is "link removed" tag, as it refers to purposeful editing of the page with a goal to strip out that particular link.

We figured there was some confusion as to what "Dates" in the "Broken backlinks" report refer to.

So we fixed that:

At this point I want to say big thanks to our amazingly smart and attentive customers, who don't allow us to have any duds in our interface.

And speaking of customer feedbacks...

We have adopted a cool online service, that helps to collect and prioritise customer feature requests:

https://ahrefs.canny.io/

Just by sharing it with our Facebook group, the board got quickly filled with a lot of great feature requests and suggestions.

So far we love where this is going and we're already looking for a place to feature this little service on our website, so that anyone could easily locate it and request features.

Meanwhile, feel free to add anything that you think should be added to Ahrefs platform here: https://ahrefs.canny.io/

As I've already mentioned, right now we're buried with work on Rank Tracker and Site Audit. But once these two biggies are released, we'll dig into your feature requests and will do our best to ship them fast.

That's it for June.

See you next month!