{"id":17407,"date":"2017-10-05T00:27:24","date_gmt":"2017-10-05T08:27:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/?p=17407"},"modified":"2017-10-05T01:27:33","modified_gmt":"2017-10-05T09:27:33","slug":"sept-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/sept-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"New in September: Traffic value, JS crawling, \u201cdelayed\u201d links & more"},"content":{"rendered":"
I had to skip reports for July and August, because the only two things we were working on were the release of new Rank Tracker<\/a> and the upcoming release of Site Audit<\/a> tool. <\/div>\n

But we made quite a few cool updates in September:<\/p>\n

1. Ahrefs now crawls links in JS<\/h2>\n

This is a pretty big deal actually, so it was already announced with a dedicated article: <\/p>\n

Ahrefs crawlers are now rendering web pages and executing JavaScript<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Right now we only execute JS on pages that have over 15 referring domains pointing at them. <\/p>\n

But that is 30 Million pages every 24 hours!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That said, we\u2019re the only SEO tool that can crawl JS at scale as of today. Which we\u2019re insanely proud of.<\/p>\n

2. Ahrefs\u2019 Big Data in numbers<\/h2>\n

We often say that Ahrefs tools are powered by Big Data, but we rarely give you updates on what these numbers are.<\/p>\n

So we allocated a bit of time last month to create a cool page that would list all the most important numbers behind Ahrefs:<\/p>\n

Ahrefs in numbers<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

For the time being, it is just a snapshot of our data (and infrastructure) as of September. <\/p>\n

But because we continuously improve our service and all these numbers grow consistently, we\u2019ll probably develop an API to pull the most recent data every time you load that page.<\/p>\n

3. \u201cTraffic value\u201d metric<\/h2>\n

Every marketer knows that traffic by itself is a vanity metric (in most cases).<\/p>\n

So we\u2019ve added a monetary value right next to the amount of organic search traffic that Ahrefs estimates for any website or URL:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cTraffic value\u201d basically shows how much you would have to pay using AdWords to get the same amount of visits from the same search queries that this website ranks for organically (learn more<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Some of the search queries have very high Cost Per Click, because a lot of people want to place their ads in the search results. But other search queries are of no interest to any advertisers, so the CPC is practically 0.<\/p>\n

This is why you might see websites with a small amount of traffic that costs a lot, as well as websites with huge traffic that is dirt cheap.<\/p>\n

4. \u201cDelayed\u201d new backlinks<\/h2>\n

In Site Explorer tool<\/a>, under \u201cBacklinks > New\u201d report, you may have seen a new tag: <\/p>\n

Delayed<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

To explain what it means, I will have to tell you a little bit about how Ahrefs crawler works:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say we have crawled 1 page and discovered links to 10 other pages on it. <\/p>\n

We won\u2019t go and crawl all these 10 pages right away, because each of them will probably have another 10 links, which we\u2019ll have to also immediately crawl. And each of those will have another 10, and so on\u2026<\/p>\n

So what we do instead is save all the URLs that we have found on that page to our \u201csmart scheduler.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201csmart scheduler\u201d then uses a bunch of factors to determine which of these URLs have to be crawled first and which ones can be crawled later.<\/p>\n

Sidenote.<\/div> One of the main factors that will influence our decision to crawl an unknown URL is (obviously) how often we find links to that page from other pages that we crawl. <\/div>\n

But even though we didn\u2019t crawl a certain URL right away, we have recorded the date when we first discovered it. <\/p>\n

And this is how this Delayed<\/strong> tag was born.<\/p>\n

The whole purpose of \u201cNew Backlinks\u201d report in Site Explorer<\/a> is to show you the most recent backlinks. <\/p>\n

But it may happen that you get a link from a very low quality page that our \u201csmart scheduler\u201d will not feed to our crawler for quite a while. So by the time we crawl this page and discover your backlink, it won\u2019t really be \u201cnew.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is why we decided to add a Delayed<\/strong> tag to such backlinks. <\/p>\n

It indicates that we have discovered the linking page more than 90 days ago, but only crawled it just now and discovered that it links to you.<\/p>\n

5. More data on \u201cTop Pages\u201d<\/h2>\n

One of my favourite reports in Site Explorer tool<\/a> is \u201cOrganic search > Top pages.\u201d <\/p>\n

It helps me to quickly assess which pages bring the most traffic to the websites of my competitors.<\/p>\n

But that report was just a bit incomplete. So we\u2019ve added two more columns to it:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n