This article covers what Backlink Manager is, enabling Backlink Manager, adding, editing, and deleting custom backlinks, understanding Trust Flow and Citation Flow, and interpreting the reason codes for lost or deleted links.

Backlink Manager lets you manually track and report on the backlinks that are especially important to you or your clients. Instead of watching every link on the web, you add the specific links you care about, then monitor whether they stay live over time.

Backlink data and link-health metrics, like Trust Flow and Citation Flow, are provided by Majestic, an industry-standard backlink analysis tool. AgencyAnalytics reports the metrics we receive from Majestic; we can't recalculate or change them.

Step 1: Open the Client where you'd like to connect Backlink Manager, then click the Data tab at the top.

Step 2: Click the blue Connect Data Source button in the upper right corner of the page.

Step 3: Search for Backlink Manager in the search bar at the top, then click the Backlink Manager card.

Step 4: Click Enable at the bottom left to turn on Backlink Manager. It will be enabled after a few seconds.

Backlink Manager lets you manually track and report on backlinks that are especially important to you or your clients.

Step 1: From within a Client, hover over the left sidebar, click SEO to expand the menu, then click Backlink Manager.

Step 2: Click the Add Backlink button, either in the center of the page or, if you've added a backlink before, in the upper right corner of the page.

Step 3: In the pop-over, fill in the required fields (see the table below), then click Add Backlink in the bottom left to add the backlink for monitoring.

Step 4: Explore your Published and Unpublished links by clicking the matching tab at the top of the page. Published links can also be viewed as a graph, broken down by your custom link type.

You can edit backlinks from the same page where you add and monitor them.

Step 1: From within a Client, hover over the left sidebar, click SEO to expand the menu, then click Backlink Manager.

Step 2: Hover over the link that you'd like to change, click the Ellipsis on the far right to open a dropdown menu, then click Edit.

Step 3: Edit the required fields, then save them at the bottom left to update the backlink. If you changed the backlink's status, you'll now see it on the opposite tab (Published or Unpublished).

Step 1: Click the box to the left of the backlink name, then click the Delete button above it.

Step 2: In the confirmation pop-up, review the backlinks that will be removed. When you're sure, click the red Delete button to remove them completely.

Trust Flow and Citation Flow are proprietary metrics created by majestic.com in 2012, and are now used as industry-standard measures of link profile health. Both can be applied to any URL, root domain, or subdomain.

The calculations used to create these metrics are complex, but in general, they can be defined as follows:

AgencyAnalytics simply reports the flow metrics we receive from Majestic. We can't recalculate, contest, appeal, or change them.

Want to go deeper? These resources explain flow metrics in more detail:

Majestic's initial announcement and explanation of their flow metrics from 2012
​Using Majestic Citation Flow and Trust Flow to check the Quality of your Link Prospects (Another post from Majestic's blog)
​Citation Flow vs Trust Flow: What is it? (A brief, 3rd-party definition)

You've worked hard to build links for your clients, so it helps to know when one goes missing. Your backlink data includes a Lost Links section that gives a Reason Lost code for each link that has disappeared. Knowing why a link disappeared is the first step to getting it back.

Our Majestic integration includes a dedicated section that notifies you whenever a link is lost. A link can disappear for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a link is removed manually by a site owner. Other times, a link is removed due to a mistake or a technical glitch. Because this backlink data comes from Majestic, the codes below are adapted from an original blog post from Majestic.

This is the most common reason a link is lost. It usually happens in one of three ways:

1. The link was manually removed by the site owner or webmaster.

2. The link was in an RSS feed and got pushed off the page. RSS feeds constantly add new content, so your link isn't static; it moves down the feed until it falls off the page. When our bot revisits the original URL, the link is no longer there. Look for clues: if you see the word "feed" in the URL, the link was almost certainly pushed to a new page. You can also check the New Links tab to see if you recently got a fresh link from the same domain.

3. The link came from an advertisement. Ad networks rotate ads between your site and competing sites. Our bot might see your ad and link to it once, then a different ad the next time it crawls, which can make it look like your link was lost.

Canonical tags let you point search engines to the page you want them to crawl, rather than a duplicate, most often to resolve www vs non-www or http vs https.

When a bot crawls a site without a canonical tag, it sees the separate versions of the same page as two different pages. If your link is on both, it's crawled and counted twice. Once a rel=canonical When a tag is added, the bot treats the two pages as one, so one of those duplicate links is reported as "lost."

This redirect is used when a site owner wants to move a whole page to a new location, forever. It passes link juice in the view of search engines, more than other redirect types. Seeing this in your Lost tab usually means you'll get a new link tied to this change on a new URL. It may take a few days for us to crawl and find the new link.

Webmasters often use this redirect during maintenance, a redesign, or a minor technical issue that should be fixed quickly. It passes very little link juice because it's meant to be temporary. If you spot this in your lost links, the link will likely be back soon.

This usually means our bot reached the URL and got a response, but was refused entry. It most often happens when a site's web host uses security software or a default setup that won't let our bot pass. The most common fix is a quick email to the site owner, asking their web host to whitelist the MJ12 bot. If they can't or won't whitelist it, we won't be able to crawl the link.

Simply put, the page has been removed. It's nothing personal to your business or your link, the webmaster just decided to remove the content. If you see this, try to get a link from a different page on the same domain. Just because the page is gone doesn't mean they won't still link to you.

The HTTP 406 response is sent when a server can't fulfill the request. Our bot can't crawl images or videos, so to save bandwidth and load time, it includes a marker asking for a reply only if the content is text, HTML, or XML. If the server doesn't think that's the case, it sends a 406 response. This is the most common scenario. It can also happen when the MIME types on a server are set up incorrectly.

This means our bot hit an unexpected issue trying to reach the page or domain. The response doesn't specify the problem, which makes it harder to resolve. The operators of the site hosting the link will need to check their logs to find the exact cause.

This happens when the requested URL takes too long to respond to our bot. If a page or domain is slow to load, there's likely a technical fault, and we can't crawl the link until the site loads in a timely manner.

Similar to a Timeout, this response means there's a technical fault. This one points to an infrastructure issue between the server and the website.

This shows an issue with the DNS server of the source domain, often after a change in IP address. Changes like this take a little time to spread across the internet. This code can also appear if the DNS server is simply down or offline. If it's down, we won't be able to crawl the site.

No. It isn't possible to import links from a file or add them in bulk. Backlink Manager is meant for your most important links only, so bulk import isn't on our roadmap.

These metrics are created by Majestic and reported as-is in AgencyAnalytics. We can't recalculate, contest, or change the flow metrics we receive from Majestic.

Links are lost for many reasons, from a manual removal to a temporary technical glitch. Check the Reason Lost code on the link in your Lost Links section, then compare it to the reason codes above to understand what happened and what you can do next.
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If you have any questions, please contact our friendly support team by following these instructions! We're available 24/5 to help 😄