How concentrated it actually is
| Metric | Links | Share of 1,301,839 |
|---|---|---|
| Top 1 referring domain | 219,159 | 16.8% |
| Top 3 | 535,638 | 41.1% |
| Top 5 | 616,963 | 47.4% |
| Top 10 | 722,513 | 55.5% |
| Top 25 | 889,743 | 68.4% |
| Top 100 | 1,097,817 | 84.3% |
One hundred domains out of 22,260 account for 84% of every link ever recorded. The mean is 58.5 links per referring domain; the median domain contributes a handful.
Averages are useless here, and that is the point. Any statistic computed per-link across this profile is really a statistic about a hundred websites.
The single largest contributor
trafficgenerationcafe.com sent 219,159 links. Of those, 218,030 carry the identical anchor text, pointing at the identical URL — a post of mine called “In a Post Google Penguin World, It Is Still Okay To Link Out.”
One post. One sitewide link. One person's editorial decision, years ago. 16.8% of a 1.3 million link profile.
It is worth sitting with what that means for reporting. If I had quoted my backlink count in 2013 and again in 2014, the difference between those two numbers would have been almost entirely one blogger adding a footer link — an event with no relationship whatever to anything I did in the intervening year.
The same shape on the target side
Concentration is not only about who links; it is about what gets linked.
The top three target URLs take 46.4% of all links. The homepage, across its four protocol and host variants, takes 30.6%.
Two decades of publishing, several thousand pages, and roughly half the profile points at three URLs. That is not unusual and it is not a failure — it is what happens when a small number of pieces resonate. But it means “improve the site's link profile” and “get more links to this specific page” are almost entirely different projects, and conflating them is how link building budgets get spent on the wrong thing.
Measuring concentration on your own profile
This takes ten minutes and it reframes every other number in your report.
Export referring domains sorted by linking URLs. Compute the cumulative share of total links held by the top 1, top 10 and top 100 domains. Then compare the mean links per domain against the median. On this profile the mean is 58.5 and the median domain sends a handful — a gap that large tells you immediately that averages are meaningless here.
What to do with the answer: if your top ten domains hold more than half your links, then any per-link statistic in your reporting — average authority, anchor distribution, follow ratio, topical relevance — is substantially a statistic about those ten sites rather than about your profile. Recompute the ones that matter per domain and see whether the picture changes. Frequently it does.
Concentration is a risk position, not just a reporting problem
The reporting distortion is the obvious consequence. The less obvious one is fragility.
A profile where one domain holds 16.8% of the links is a profile with a single point of failure that has nothing to do with search engines. That site can be sold, redesigned, migrated to a new CMS, or simply stop publishing. Per the evidence on why links die, a redesign is the most likely of those and the one you will hear about last.
This is the practical case for diversification, stated in terms that survive contact with a spreadsheet. It is not that a concentrated profile looks unnatural — plenty of legitimate profiles are concentrated, including this one. It is that a concentrated profile has correlated failure modes, and the correlation is invisible in any metric that counts links.
The useful question is not “how many links do I have” but “how many separate decisions by separate people is my profile resting on.” On this site, for 84% of the links, the answer is one hundred.
Duplicates, and what a backlink count really describes
In the Fresh index, 7,395 of 9,772 classified links are duplicates. So a headline figure of 11,815 backlinks describes roughly 2,400 distinct ones — a factor of five between the impressive number and the real one.
The lesson is the one every practitioner states and almost nobody quantifies: link counts are dominated by sitewide placements, and a sitewide link is one link repeated.
Report referring domains. If you must report links, report distinct ones. And treat any report that leads with a backlink count, without stating the referring domain count and without separating distinct from duplicate, as reporting a number that can be moved by a factor of five without a single new editorial decision being made about your site.
Questions
Is a sitewide link bad?
Not inherently. A footer or blogroll link from a relevant site that genuinely endorses you is fine. The problem is counting it as thousands of links, which distorts every metric computed from link totals and makes profiles look far more diverse than they are.
Should I try to get sitewide links then?
They are worth roughly what one editorial endorsement is worth, because that is what they are. Pursuing them for the link count is optimizing a number rather than an outcome.
How do I check concentration on my own profile?
Export your referring domains sorted by linking URLs and compute what share of total links the top one, ten and hundred domains contribute. It takes a few minutes in a spreadsheet and it reframes every other number in the report.