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Most link builders and SEOs rely heavily on Ahrefs every day. But they stick to the same handful of reports: backlinks overview, top pages, maybe a content gap analysis. Competitors who have been using Ahrefs for years are perfectly comfortable with those workflows. And that’s exactly what makes them predictable.
The real edge isn’t in the obvious tools. It’s hidden in reports most people skip, filters they never touch, and workflows that feel slightly manual at first but reveal patterns no one else sees. This article walks through five specific Ahrefs backlink tactics that go beyond the basics. They’re practical, repeatable, and designed to help you find links and insights that your competitors consistently miss.
1. Find the Pages Your Competitors Stopped Building Links To
Competitor backlink analysis usually follows a straightforward script. You run the report, sort by the pages with the most referring domains, and start building your target list. That approach captures what’s actively being linked to right now, but it completely ignores an entire category of opportunities: pages that earned links steadily at one point and then went cold.
Identifying these dormant pages gives you an asymmetric advantage. The content already proved it can attract links. The topic has an established audience. But your competitor has moved on—maybe the page isn’t ranking well anymore, the format is outdated, or the team shifted priorities. If you can spot the pattern early, you can create a dramatically better version of that asset and pitch it to the exact sites that linked to the original.
Here’s the step-by-step workflow inside Ahrefs:
- Open Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.
- Go to the Best by Links report under the Pages section.
- Sort by referring domains, then visually scan for pages that haven’t gained a new referring domain in the last 6–12 months. You can use the date filter to isolate older pages, but a manual scan often surfaces patterns that automated filters miss.
- Export the full list to CSV if the site is large. In a spreadsheet, you can calculate the time gap between the initial link velocity and the last referring domain gained, which makes dormant pages impossible to overlook.
Edge cases matter here. Not every dormant page is an opportunity. A page that earned links because of a specific event, a temporary industry regulation, or a short-lived trend won’t yield the same result if you simply update the content. Look for pages targeting evergreen topics, foundational guides, and reference-style assets. If the core user need hasn’t changed, an improved version will almost always resonate.
Once you identify the most promising dormant pages, run each URL through the Backlinks report. Export the linking domains, clean the list, and you have a highly targeted outreach list. When you pitch, reference the fact that they linked to a similar older piece—it’s one of the warmest angles in link building because you’ve demonstrated real relevance before you even ask.
2. Exploit the “Best by Links’ Growth” Report Differently
The Best by Links’ Growth report is available in Ahrefs with a simple date range toggle, and most users treat it as a quick pulse check. They look at the top five pages, note which topics are trending, and move on. That surface-level review completely misses the signal buried in the middle of the list—pages with moderate but sustained link growth that haven’t yet attracted the attention of large-scale outreach campaigns.
Pages in the top positions of this report (by raw link count) are already on everyone’s radar. The middle tier, however, behaves differently. These pages are gaining domains consistently, but not at a pace that triggers competitive alerts. They’re often managed by smaller teams or individual site owners who aren’t aggressively scaling link building yet. If you can analyze what’s driving that growth, you can enter the space before it saturates.
How to set it up:
- Navigate to a competitor’s Site Explorer, then open Best by Links’ Growth in the Pages section.
- Set a recent date range, such as the last 30 or 60 days, to filter out historical noise.
- Ignore the top five results entirely for this analysis. Scroll to pages with 10–30 new referring domains in the period. These are your signal pages.
- Click through to the Backlinks report for each signal page and analyze the types of sites linking and, crucially, the anchor text patterns.
What often emerges is a content format or angle that’s resonating right now. Maybe it’s a specific type of statistic-driven post, a free tool that journalists are referencing, or a resource list that’s getting picked up by niche roundups. The anchor text analysis tells you the framing that’s earning links organically, and that’s pure gold for your own content strategy.
A common mistake is trying to copy the exact page. Instead, focus on the underlying need it serves and the distribution pattern. If a page is earning links because it aggregates data from ten different industry reports, the format—a centralized data hub—is the real insight. Build one for a slightly different segment or update it more frequently, and you have a distinct, pitchable asset.
This also feeds directly into proactive outreach. If you see that five different marketing blogs linked to a page because it provided a specific statistic, you can include that statistic (sourced from your own original data) in an idea pitch to similar blogs. You’re not guessing what will resonate; you’re responding to demonstrated behavior.
3. Steal Broken Backlinks That Point to Rebranded or Redirected Competitor Pages
Broken link building is a classic tactic. Most people use Ahrefs to find broken pages on resource sites or blogrolls, then pitch their own replacement content. That works, but it’s widely adopted and the response rates have dropped over time. The more aggressive variant is targeting broken backlinks that point to your competitors’ old pages—specifically pages that were quietly rebranded, moved, or redirected without proper 301 mapping.
Companies rebrand products, merge service pages, and migrate content platforms all the time. They often implement redirects, but just as often, they don’t preserve every old URL. Pages that were once heavily linked in specific niche directories, forum discussions, or old guest posts simply return a 404. The referring domains still exist, and the link equity is going nowhere. Those sites are often unaware the link broke, and the original content owner has moved on. That’s your opening.
Here’s the Ahrefs workflow:
- Use Site Explorer to pull up a competitor’s Backlinks report.
- Apply a filter for HTTP 404 not found on the target URL. This reveals every broken inbound link pointing to their domain.
- Sort by Referring Domains to prioritize the pages that once attracted the most links.
- For the top broken URLs, visit the page if it’s still accessible via Wayback Machine or cached view, to understand what the original content or resource offered.
- Export the linking domains for each broken URL into a list.
The critical step that separates an effective pitch from a generic one is the content match. Don’t just send your homepage as a replacement. If the broken URL was a specific report on “regional SaaS adoption trends from 2018,” create an updated version—or better yet, expand the scope to cover the current landscape with fresh data. When you contact the site owner, explain exactly what was broken, show that you understand why they linked to it originally, and present your updated resource as a direct, improved successor.
This tactic works best when you’ve already identified a gap in your own content library you can fill. If you’re a content marketer in the project management space, and you notice a competitor’s old comparison guide between two popular tools is now a 404, building a modern comparison page immediately gives you a pitchable asset. You don’t have to speculate about demand; the historical links prove it was reference-worthy.
One caution: don’t target competitors’ broken pages that were clearly time-sensitive (event pages, expired promotions). The link context won’t make sense for a replacement, and your pitch will feel forced. Stick to educational, reference, or tool-comparison content that retains long-term value.
4. Reverse-Engineer Competitor Link Spikes with the “New” and “Lost” Backlinks Filter
Link velocity data is noisy. A single day’s spike often represents a syndicated press release, a forum spam run, or a sitewide footer link—none of which are signals you want to replicate. Most people glance at the backlinks-over-time chart, see an upward trend, and assume the competitor must be doing something right. They rarely isolate individual spikes and trace them back to a specific cause. That’s exactly where the hidden insight lives.
The New and Lost backlinks filters in Ahrefs, when used with a narrow date window, let you audit exactly what caused a competitor’s link graph to shift. You overlay the referring domains gained and lost on the same day or week, and patterns emerge that are invisible in aggregate views. A spike of 15 new referring domains in a single day followed by zero the next is almost never organic. But a consistent trickle of new domains over a two-week period, each linking to the same page, often indicates a successful outreach push or a piece of content that got picked up by a niche community.
Set up this analysis with a structured approach:
- Go to the Backlinks report for a competitor’s domain.
- Set the date filter to Last 30 days and toggle the view to New backlinks.
- Export the CSV. In a spreadsheet, group by the target page URL and count the number of new referring domains per page.
- Isolate pages that gained 10+ referring domains in a short cluster of days, then cross-check those pages in the Anchors report to see the exact link text used.
The anchor text cross-reference often tells the full story. If a competitor’s page gained a dozen new links in five days, and every anchor is a variation of their brand name, that’s probably a PR mention or a viral social share—not a replicable tactic. But if the anchors are all slightly different long-tail phrases around the same topic, it’s almost certainly a targeted link building campaign or a piece of content that resonated in a specific community. You can then analyze the linking domains themselves: are they guest post farms, niche editorial sites, or genuine resource pages? That tells you whether to emulate or ignore the signal.
This approach also reveals defensive opportunities. If you see a competitor lost 20 referring domains in a week—perhaps because they let a resource page go stale—you immediately know which domains were willing to link to that type of content. You can then build a better version and reclaim the lost link equity for yourself. It’s the same logic as broken link building, but applied proactively at the moment of loss rather than months later.
5. Map Your Link Gap to Uncover Hidden Link Intersections
The Link Intersect tool in Ahrefs is widely known, but it’s almost always used in the most restrictive way: a user enters two or three direct competitors and looks at domains that link to all of them but not to their own site. That’s useful, but it only surfaces the most obvious targets. The deeper application is analyzing indirect competitors, media sites, or resource hubs that operate in adjacent but non-competing spaces.
The core limitation of standard link intersect analysis is that it tells you where the pack is already grazing. When you compare yourself against three direct competitors and extract the intersecting domains, you’re seeing the media outlets and resource pages that already cover your exact competitive niche heavily. Those site owners receive pitches from your competitors constantly. Switching the inputs forces the tool to reveal domains you’d never think to compare.
Try these input combinations instead:
- A well-known industry blog, a popular newsletter sponsor page, and a podcast shownotes domain. The intersect often reveals niche directories, community platforms, and small curation sites that actively link out to resources in your space but aren’t directly competitive.
- An event or conference site in your industry, a trade association, and a major media outlet’s category page. This combination surfaces the link networks around shared industry infrastructure—speaker pages, sponsor lists, partner directories—that are often overlooked.
- A failing or outdated site that still ranks for key terms, a legacy platform that underpins your industry’s knowledge base, and a .edu program page. This intersect can reveal institutional and educational links that carry disproportionate trust weight.
Once you run the report, export the full domain list before you start qualifying. Many domains will appear irrelevant at first glance—a personal blog from 2009, an abandoned conference site, a university student project page. Don’t dismiss them instantly. Look at the specific page that’s linking, its topical relevance, and the link placement context. A student resource page on open-source GIS tools might link to five of your competitors’ data visualization assets. That’s a highly specific, topically focused link with long-term stability, and almost no one is pitching the page owner for inclusion.
The real value of these intersect combinations is that they surface linking patterns your competitors haven’t systematized. They might have earned those links organically or through one-off relationships, but they likely don’t have a documented strategy around them. If you can identify the common thread (a specific resource format, a research methodology, a data series), you can build assets that systematically attract links from that entire network.
A practical workflow: run three different intersect combinations each month, export the unique domains, and merge them into a master prospect list. Tag each domain by intersect type so you can track which combination surfaces the most qualified leads over time. This turns a one-off exercise into a repeatable research engine.
Putting the Tactics into a Repeatable Workflow
Individually, each of these tactics can deliver a handful of strong link opportunities. The cumulative effect matters more. When you build a weekly or monthly process that combines dormant page research, growth signal analysis, broken competitor backlinks, spike audits, and non-obvious link intersects, you stop competing on the same link lists as everyone else. You consistently find opportunities in the gaps between standard reports.
Start with one tactic and integrate it into your existing workflow. The broken competitor backlinks approach, for instance, can be folded into your existing broken link building process with minimal additional effort. Once it feels routine, add the dormant page analysis. Over time, you’ll build a link prospect pipeline that surfaces domains your competitors never see, from angles they aren’t monitoring.
The key is treating Ahrefs as a discovery engine, not a reporting dashboard. The default reports give you data. The tactics above give you signal.
How do you spot those dormant pages exactly?
Is there a specific Ahrefs filter to see when a page stopped getting links?
What timeframe do you use to decide a page has gone cold?
Wouldn’t Google still see those outdated pages as competitors? I’m wary of targeting topics they abandoned for a reason.
I’m trying to picture this: you’d pull the backlinks report, sort by date, and then manually check which pages have a gap in new links? Or is there a quicker way to visualize the drop-off?
Can you automate spotting those cold pages?
Once you find a dormant page, do you just recreate the content and outreach, or do you need to update the angle significantly?
Do you filter by DR when looking at pages that lost link velocity?
I get the logic, but what if the competitor stopped building links because the topic just isn’t relevant anymore? How do you avoid wasting time on those instead of jumping on a real gem that they simply neglected?
Are these pages usually old blog posts or resource pages?
How far back do you look?
I’d be afraid of just replicating a dying page. Do you have a real-life example where a cold page you revived ended up earning more links than the original?
Do you check the page’s traffic trend in Ahrefs before targeting it?
You mentioned the page format might be outdated, but how do you judge that? Is it something you determine manually or do you look for signals like a decline in organic traffic paired with a stable backlink profile that suddenly flatlined?
Why wouldn’t competitors just update those pages themselves?