/seo-backlinks-profile

name: seo-backlinks-profile
description: Full backlink profile for a domain — referring domains, anchor text distribution, authority distribution, IP and subnet diversity, growth/decay trend, toxic-candidate flagging. Distinct from `seo-backlink-gap` (which is gap-vs-competitor only). Produces a profile health score and reviewable disavow candidate list (never auto-disavow). Use when the user asks "backlink profile", "link profile audit", "anchor distribution", "toxic links", "disavow candidates", or "backlink health".

> Example output: [examples/seo-backlinks-profile-stripe-com-20260514/PROFILE.md](../../examples/seo-backlinks-profile-stripe-com-20260514/PROFILE.md)

Backlinks Profile

A complete backlink profile audit for a domain. Surfaces composition (where do links come from?), quality (what's the authority distribution?), diversity (concentrated in a few IPs/subnets, or spread out?), trajectory (growing or decaying?), and risk (which links look manipulative?). Output includes a health score and a reviewable disavow-candidate list — never an auto-disavow.

Single-source by design

This skill consults **only the SE Ranking backlink index**. We don't blend Ahrefs / Moz / Majestic / DataForSEO / Common Crawl into the same report. That's a deliberate choice, not a limitation:

• **Internally consistent metrics.** Authority scores, anchor counts, and refdomain totals are computed against a single crawl. Multi-source blends produce numbers that look authoritative but actually average across crawls with different sampling, different freshness, and different definitions of "backlink" — the resulting ratios (e.g. dofollow %, anchor distribution) are noise.
• **Reproducible health scores.** The 100-point health score in this report can be re-run a quarter later against the same source and the deltas are meaningful. With multi-source blends, a score drift can mean *anything*: source A reweighted, source B refreshed, source C changed its toxic heuristic.
• **No data-source independence to model.** Any "do these sources agree?" question is unanswerable without a second backlink graph; we don't pretend to answer it. If you need cross-source confirmation (e.g. before legal disavow, before a high-stakes outreach campaign), pair this profile with a manual spot-check against Ahrefs/Majestic — that's a research task, not a skill output.

If your workflow specifically *requires* multi-source blending (large agencies, link-builders billing on link counts), this skill is the wrong tool — use a vendor that aggregates multiple indexes. For everyone else, single-source produces the more honest report.

Prerequisites

• SE Ranking MCP server connected.
• User provides: a target domain.
• Claude's `WebFetch` tool optional (for spot-checking flagged toxic candidates).
• `mcp__firecrawl-mcp__firecrawl_scrape` optional (for the new step 8b — link-source verification).

Process

1. **Validate target & preflight.** See `skills/seo-firecrawl/references/preflight.md` for the canonical 3-stage preflight (credit balance, Firecrawl availability, Google APIs). Skill-specific notes:

• Normalise domain before continuing.
• Estimated SE Ranking cost for this skill: moderate (full-profile run; no per-keyword multiplier).
• Firecrawl: optional. When `--verify-sources` is passed, step 8b (link-source verification) scrapes top-20 referring domains' linking pages to verify each link is still present and what `rel` it carries (dofollow / nofollow / sponsored / UGC), ~20 Firecrawl credits per run. Default off; pass `--no-firecrawl` to skip even if available.
• Google APIs: not used.

2. **Profile summary** `DATA_getBacklinksSummary`

• Total backlinks, total referring domains, dofollow/nofollow ratio, link-type distribution (text / image / form / frame), growth velocity over the last 30/90 days.

3. **Referring domains** `DATA_getBacklinksRefDomains`

• Top N referring domains by authority. Pull authority score, link count per domain, domain TLD, country.

4. **Anchor distribution** `DATA_getBacklinksAnchors`

• Top anchor texts by frequency.
• Classify each anchor: branded (contains brand name), exact-match commercial (the target's primary commercial keyword), partial-match, generic ("click here", "read more", "this page"), naked URL, image-alt-derived.

5. **Authority distribution** `DATA_getBacklinksAuthority` and `DATA_getDistributionOfDomainAuthority`

• Histogram of referring-domain authority: how many DA 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, etc.
• A healthy profile has a long tail; an unhealthy profile is concentrated at DA<10.

6. **IP and subnet diversity** `DATA_getReferringIps`, `DATA_getReferringIpsCount`, `DATA_getReferringSubnetsCount`

• Total unique IPs hosting referring domains.
• Total unique /24 subnets.
• Compute concentration ratio: `referring_domains / unique_subnets`. Healthy: ~3–10. Unhealthy: many domains share few subnets (PBN signal).

7. **Growth / decay trend** `DATA_getNewLostBacklinksCount`, `DATA_getNewLostRefDomainsCount`

• Net new backlinks per month (last 6 months).
• Net new referring domains per month.
• Velocity changes — sharp spikes or sharp losses both deserve flags.

8. **Lost links list** `DATA_listNewLostBacklinks`, `DATA_listNewLostReferringDomains`

• Sample recent losses. Are any high-authority losses?

8b. **Optional: live link-source verification** `mcp__firecrawl-mcp__firecrawl_scrape`

• Triggered only when `--verify-sources` is passed (default off — credit-conscious).
• For the top 20 referring domains by authority (from step 3), pick the highest-authority linking page per domain. Scrape each (20 Firecrawl credits typical).
• For each scrape, parse the returned `html` for `<a href>` matching the target domain. Capture: link still present (`true`/`false`/`page-404`), `rel` attribute (`dofollow` if absent or empty, else the literal value: `nofollow`, `ugc`, `sponsored`, or combinations), surrounding context (anchor text + 50 ch