Every few months the common crawl releases data on how domains link to each other. We call that "linking domains". The Crawl Tool is primarily an on-site SEO tool, because there's an argument that if you're looking to acquire links that are on topic then simply searching is a good way (perhaps even the best way). However, an overview of linking domain data can be handy in understanding why a site ranks the way it does and to understand which aspects of the linking of the site are most important. We, therefore, don't want to rule out having link related functionality completely.

A new feature in The Crawl Tool is therefore a list of linking domains. This will show on crawling a project, assuming that our database of linking domains contains one item to the site in the project. Keep in mind here that if the site in the project is less than three months old, it may not have any backlinks in the database yet. When we refresh the database from the crawl in a few months time, if there are links that have been found then they'll start to show after subsequent crawls.

In most cases, this means if you're an existing user it will show once you've recrawled your project by clicking the crawl button, or after the next scheduled crawl (if you don't have scheduled crawling set up, what a great time to do so!). Scheduling a crawl is the easiest way to keep your data up to date and to get new reports automatically. New users will see the report available after the first crawl.